This is what we know about the prospects for revised naturalization requirements:
The Liberal Party platform included an agenda to remove "unfair" hurdles to citizenship and "restore" credit for time living in Canada prior to landing and becoming a PR.
Beyond that, the short version is that any changes are going to take time, a good while if not a long while.
The longer explanation:
The Liberal Party won the election and is now in the process of forming a majority government (Trudeau becomes Prime Minister tomorrow and is expected to name around two dozen members of Cabinet, including the next Minister of CIC), but it will still be at least several more weeks before Parliament is in session.
In the meantime, MPs are extremely busy engaged in just organizational tasks, getting things in order to actually begin governing the country.
The earliest sittings of Parliament will be extremely busy with the basic tasks of governing. Even high priority legislative changes will have to wait until some time next year to so much as be drafted, let alone tabled.
We cannot expect the Liberals to rush legislation through the parliamentary process at the same rate as the Conservatives did these previous four years. Indeed, expect the opposite, a more open process which will engage stake holders and the public, involve more consultations, more debate, more time spent considering alternative proposals and amendments, a more democratic process, which will add up to a significantly longer timeline for a Bill to go from tabled to adopted.
While the Senate rarely stalls legislation for extended time periods, and even more rarely blocks legislation, the Conservatives have a majority in the Senate and are capable of stalling, and may even in some instances outright block legislation. The extent they do so will be a political decision probably directed by the new leadership of the Conservative Party. Anticipate more political posturing relative to high profile Conservative agenda items, which would include Bill C-51, parts of Bill C-24, and Bill C-23; expect the Conservative Senate to hold any legislation affecting these items long enough to publicize negatives, like claims of coddling terrorists, weakening Canadian citizenship, or compromising the electoral system.
Additionally, in the last four years much of the Harper legislation actually was accelerated in its timeline moving through the Senate. That is not at all likely to happen for Liberal legislation. Rather the opposite as noted above. But even the baseline for how long it takes a Bill to proceed through the Senate and back to Parliament will be longer than what we have observed in the last four years.
All of which adds up to it could be a long while before any particular changes are actually made and put into effect. Some may indeed take place in 2016, but many changes will not get done for years.
There are a lot of unknown variables affecting the prospects for revised naturalization requirements:
As noted, the Liberal Party platform included an agenda to remove "unfair" hurdles to citizenship and "restore" credit for time living in Canada prior to landing and becoming a PR.
We do not know what this means in particular. Speculation ranges from eliminating the intent to reside requirement to changing the 4/6 itself, from restoring credit for pre-PR time (was half-credit until June 11, 2015) to implementing a full credit for pre-PR time.
We do not know whether this is a priority item or merely one among the scores of items in the Liberal Platform; thus, we do not know if there is any plan to address these changes sooner or just sometime in the next several years.
Some practical considerations:
Party platforms are oft referred to as "promises," but they are more realistically described as prospective items in the respective Party's agenda, unless they are specifically advocated as a promise. Many such items do not get done, at least not in the four years following the election of a majority government (a higher percentage do not get done if there is a minority government), and many are not done as they are initially proffered. There are many, many reasons why this or that Party platform item does not get done.
There is NO counting on any change taking place until the legislation is actually at least approaching the third reading stage. A lot of legislation gets proposed and tabled, but ends up withering on the vine.
There should be minimal expectation of any particular change taking place until the government has, at the very least, announced that a Bill will be tabled to implement the particular change. Even then, expectation should be tempered until the Bill is actually tabled and reaches, at the least, a second reading.
This will be more true of a Liberal government. The Harper Conservatives ran a different sort of government, using their majority in the House of Parliament and in the Senate to ram legislation through with minimal consultations, minimal debate, virtually no opportunity to consider amendments. Once Harper's government tabled legislation, it was usually planned to follow through and adopt that legislation (not always, they did table some just for political show, especially in the months just before dissolving Parliament). Most indicators suggest a more open democratic process under the Liberals, which will be inherently more cumbersome and less predictable (the cost of being more democratic, a cost well worth paying usually), and again it will take longer. What this means, though, is that expectation for this or that change should be low key until it is more or less clear the legislation is going to actually be adopted and implemented.
In other words, do not be counting chickens before the hen has even met the rooster.
