Requirement of police certificate for eligibility period

[powerstroke]

This is my personal experience in regards to the requirement of a PC for our citizenship application. Your mileage may differ.

As you know, there is a requirement of obtaining a PC from all countries you've spent more than 183 days in the past 4 years. This creates a situation where after 3 years as a PR a person would still technically require a PC from home country.

Our process was
* Moved to Canada on a Temporary Work Permit in 2014.
* Provided a PC from home country in 2015 as part of our PR application.
* Received PR in mid 2015.
* Visited home country for 2 weeks in 2017.
* Applied for citizenship in March 2018.
* DM for citizenship application in November 2018.
This meant that we spent more than 183 days in home country in the last 4 years and visited home country after a PC was issued.

What does this mean? I wasn't required to provide an additional PC.
Again, this is my case, yours might be different. Take this with a grain of salt.

 

[dawn_canada]

Thank you for sharing your experience.

 

[dpenabill]

IRCC has implemented a new version of the application: CIT 0002 (01-2019).

The new version specifically includes changes to Item 10.b. regarding police certificate requirements:

This includes a couple big changes.

The first is that the NEW instructions specifically state that "If you were in your country of origin immediately prior to becoming a permanent resident and landing in Canada and this time falls within this four (4) year period, you are NOT required to provide a police certificate. Please indicate this in the explanation box."

This is good news for scores of applicants who could not understand why they would need to provide a police certificate when they essentially had full background checks prior to coming to and landing in Canada. Caveat is that the language here is still fuzzy. Easy enough to figure out but any imprecision is bound to cause some confusion for at least some percentage of applicants.

The second change for this item is that it clearly instructs what constitutes a timely issued police certificate: either one issued SINCE the last time the applicant was in that country, or no more than six months before the application date. Conventional wisdom and many forum participants had expressed the view that certificates meeting these criteria would suffice, but now there is an explicit instruction stating this. Good to know.