Officers cannot stop the applicant from getting the certificate; they can make the process non-routine, prolong it, and make the applicant do way more paper work than otherwise required, is all...
It is not clear what this comment is about. Naturalized Canadian citizens, and citizens by birth but born abroad, are of course entitled to be issued a certificate of citizenship. The context of the discussion here, however, is the impact of leaving Canada while an application for a
grant of citizenship is pending. Citizenship Officers have the authority to deny such applications if the applicant fails to sufficiently prove qualification for the grant, except that in cases where the issue is whether the applicant met the physical presence requirement, the Citizenship Officer can only decline to grant citizenship and make a referral to a Citizenship Judge, who in turn will determine whether the applicant met the presence requirement.
While time abroad after applying is not and cannot be deducted from the calculation of presence, which must be based on days present in Canada during the relevant time period, which is defined based on the date the application is made, an applicant's extended absence after applying can affect and be considered by IRCC in assessing the applicant and the application. Depending on the particular circumstances and facts in the specific case, this may have no impact, or it may merely trigger non-routine processing, or it can be relevant to a determination that ultimately results in the denial of a grant of citizenship (negative impact on credibility for example). Thus, while the most common impact living abroad will have,
if any, is that it triggers non-routine processing, it warrants cautioning that it can play a role in the ultimate decision.
I know there are a lot RQs in C-24 period, but did not hear any since 2016. I am wondering if anyone got RQ recently?
There have, indeed, been very few recent reports of RQ, but there are such reports periodically, including one quite recently (within the previous month). It is readily apparent that some applicants are still being issued CIT 0171, the full-blown RQ. It is less apparent that CIT 0520, some times referred to as RQ-lite, is being used, but there have been reports of it since the changeover to IRCC (that is, since the Liberals formed the government).
Not sure what you mean by the C-24 period. RQ peaked in 2012 in the wake of OP-407 which implemented pre-test RQ and prescribed a draconian list of risk indicators, or "triage criteria," which automatically triggered RQ. And RQ was otherwise widely issued prior to that, including to applicants who appeared, as characterized primarily by Conservatives, to be
applying-on-the-way-to-the-airport (that is, those who left Canada to live abroad while the application was pending).
There are many reasons why there has been a dramatic drop off in the number of RQ'd cases, not the least of which is that the change to a strict physical presence requirement for a longer period of time (at least four years presence), implemented by Bill C-24, resulted in a huge, huge reduction in the number of applications being made for at least a year plus some (meaning until the latter part of last year), and it also eliminated what was referred to as the
short-fall application (prior to Bill C-24, PRs were eligible for citizenship once they had been a PR for three years even if they had not been physically present in Canada for three years; but such cases necessarily required a qualitative assessment of residency, which almost always required RQ during the Harper years). In other words, during the C-24 period the issuance of RQ has been way, way down . . . at least in large part due to far fewer applications and the elimination of the
short-fall applicant.
Note, in particular, that RQ these days inherently means that IRCC has concerns the applicant failed to accurately report all travel abroad. The application would be summarily returned to the applicant as incomplete if the applicant fails to declare presence for the minimum required (currently 1460 days), so any applicant issued RQ is necessarily being examined for potentially failing to report all absences.
Of course, this raises all kinds of questions about the meaning of "temporary," when one actually makes a change of residence, etc.
Sort of. It is not as if there is any definitive element at stake. It is less about the meaning of terms like "temporary" or "residence," and more about whether an applicant appears to be willfully misleading or evasive. This does not depend on the precise meaning of any particular term. In this regard, it is worth remembering that IRCC tends to allege misrepresentation only when there are very specific false facts involved, and will not directly base a determination on a finding of compromised credibility unless there are fairly specific discrepancies which appear to have been intentionally made,
but can approach an applicant far more skeptically based on circumstances which less definitively compromise the applicant's credibility. And this can have a huge impact, in a negative way, on how things go.
Fudging information, including by omission, is simply a bad idea. There is little refuge to be found in what many refer to as "can I say . . . ?" That's not a good approach.