In any case friends, question, IRCC states:
"In order for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) to continue the process of your citizenship application, scanned copies or photos of all passport(s) and travel document(s) pages held during your eligibility period are required. If you do not have a travel document or passport, please provide an explanation. You must provide a colour copy of each page, including blank pages."
The passport I used to get into Canada was issued in February 2020, and I immigrated on a WHV in October 2020, got PR in Feb 2023, applied for citizenship in April 2025. Obviously I need to scan all the pages for this one.
I also have my old passport issued from 2011 to 2021. Do I really need to scan this one? It is a shitload of scanning lol.
Not sure. Presumably the reason you're asking is because you didn't use the old passport once you got the new one in Feb 2020, and therefore there's nothing relevant in it since you haven't traveled on it during the eligibility period.
However, there's a common refrain on this forum. "If in doubt, yep, follow the instructions."
"all passport(s) ...
held during your eligibility period are required"
They don't say all the ones you used to travel to or from Canada. They don't even say all the ones that you traveled on, anywhere. They say all the ones you held.
Now though, if you somehow
forgot to include the old one, would it matter? Would they even notice, if you never used it for travel? I'm not sure.
If I were in your position though, I'd prefer to play it safe and do the extra scans. I'd rather do the extra work than risk an action (or an inaction) that could possibly lead to my credibility being questions.
BTW: for my spouse, I'm not even going to get into how much scanning I had to do. More than four passports/travel docs, all with passport-like #s of pages. It was a pain but manageable.
Good god bro I just spent the last 3 hours scanning 1 passport... the amount of retakes because of the accidental finger or bad lighting. Can't imagine how much you had to go through!!
I'm sure they'll come up with an AI scanner or something eventually - it has so much AI that you can just hand it your passport and it scans all the pages inside at once or something - or at least opens the passport and flips the pages on its own.
Spoke to my dad about what you guys said. Wish I could get you guys in a room together lol,
Haha, me too, except that...
He won't say much more about the how,
Well, that'd be my main draw to agreeing to get into that room though, haha. So if he can't say (and I'm sure there's good reason for it), then maybe there wouldn't be too much point in the exercise.
Spoke to my dad about what you guys said.
he maintains that if you come to Australia, he will know your global travel history upon scanning or obtaining your passport details. He won't say much more about the how, but maintains any immigration officer around the world involved in the processing of clients should have access to the same.
So I did the modern thing - I asked ChatGPT about it. It referred me to these two articles:
https://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/3607...an-see-about-you-when-they-scan-your-passport
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08...ning-border-control-customs-officer/105642532
From the information in those articles, it basically seems that your dad is correct, though there are a couple of important caveats. It seems that aside from Australia's own entry-exit records (which they've been maintaining since at least 1981), they do have agreements with other countries to share this data. Also, they obtain information from Passenger Name Records and Advanced Passenger Information - which are provided by the airlines.
So if you had to, or at least chose to, flight between countries, then perhaps people like your dad can see all the places you've flown from and to. And for someone who's Australia-centered, where flights are really the only way to enter and leave the country, this viewpoint makes sense. (Also, it's a bit creepy that airlines
But when Australia itself is not the source of the info - e.g. any US-Canada travel would come from either the US or Canada, or both - then the info is only as reliable as the source. So your dad couldn't scan my passport(s) (even all the old ones) and see my travels between the US and Canada back before 2012 - because when I checked, neither country had a record of it. (I did ask - originally for my citizenship app I asked for a copy of my entry and exit records just to help me double check my physical presence calculation and buffer, but I also asked for extra records from earlier just because I could. I only got back recent post-2015 info.)
I had a co-worker who was visiting Germany. He told me that when he was driving on a highway, the GPS would announce when he had entered Austria - and then when he was back in Germany. Apparently that was a winding road since he shuttled between the two countries while going down that highway multiple times. While your dad might be able to see my co-worker's entry into Germany/the EU from the US, I doubt he'd be able to see the Germany-Austria movements.
So thanks to info sharing between countries and from airlines, your dad can could see a good chunk my global travel history, but some of it would evade him.
It does occur to me that perhaps Canada can see the PNR and API records, but this somehow contradicts some other source that they also have access to, and thus it may be less about IRCC missing a record entirely but instead that they want to see a third source (your passport pages) to verify which record is the more accurate one and help them complete the picture?
But if you believe your father's stories, don't you think they'd all know you had another valid passport during this time?
Well, travel history and travel documents are different things. If they only have the record of travels that must have used the old passport but not the old passport's details itself - which seems more probable if the other poster never used that passport for travel involving Canada - then perhaps they don't know when it was issued or expired. Shift things back by a year or two, and the old passport no longer is in the eligibility period.
Alternatively, even if IRCC did know that, they still might not count it but rather are waiting for the other poster to confirm that it was lost or stolen before Feb 2020. (Actually I'm guessing the reason to get the new passport early is because the old passport was going to expire too soon and thus couldn't retain the entire validity of the WHV.)
But if you believe your father's stories,
Spoke to my dad about what you guys said.
he maintains that if you come to Australia, he will know your global travel history upon scanning or obtaining your passport details.
Saving the best for last - can you ask your dad for help? Like if you can make a quick visit to your dad and by and by having him scan your passport while you're there, and he prints out or emails you a copy of your travel history... perhaps his (and Australia's) records might have the missing info that IRCC is looking for?
