injau said:
hello,
can someone shed some light on my case as i am a bit worried, we applied for citizenship in 2012, and we received rq which we submitted back and then we did finger print and passed the the test on march 2014 in Hamilton , though we are not short of days or anything the officer after the test asked us questions about the jobs and children school though two of our kids were born here, after the interview he said i will transfer your file to a citizenship judge and if he is satisfied they will call us for ceremony.
we called call center many times and they say the same thing your RQ in Que for review!!! it is almost a year now!! can someone shed some light on this please we are very worried now.
thanks
Odds are high the call centre representatives said what it is: your application is in a queue for review due to questions about whether your submissions have proven residency.
Odds are also high there will be movement on your case in the next several months (perhaps tomorrow, sometime this year anyway), and you will next see one of the following:
-- scheduled for the oath
-- request for additional documents
-- scheduled for an interview/hearing with a Citizenship Officer
-- scheduled for an interview/hearing with a Citizenship Judge
Not easy to predict which of these will happen next.
Pursuing a Writ of Mandamus may accelerate when the next step happens but will not increase the odds of a favourable outcome.
Contacting your MP may help you to learn more about when something is likely to happen next for your case. Alternatively, if you have not yet done an ATIP request, you might want to consider doing so and specifically asking for a copy of all materials prepared for a Citizenhip Judge or Citizenship Officer to review in making a decision about your case.
Some background observations:
At the time you took the test (March 2014) and the interviewer said the file will be transferred to a Citizenship Judge, all citizenship applications were referred to a Citizenship Judge. Those deemed a
residency-case, however, would be queued for a Citizenship Officer to prepare a referral using the longer, more detailed FPAT (File Preparation Analysis Template). There was (and to some extent still remains) a huge backlog of
residency-cases in queue for this process.
In the meantime, as of August 1, 2014 (per portions of Bill C-24 which came into force on August 1), the process changed relative to the respective roles of Citizenship Officers and Citizenship Judges. Now Citizenship Officers do more than just prepare a referral for the Citizenship Judge, but actually act in a decision-making role pursuant to which they make ultimate decisions including decisions such as whether a
residency-case applicant met the residency requirement and is to be granted citizenship.
It appears you are still in queue for this review to be completed, or in queue for a hearing based on a decision you did not meet the residency requirement.
While you have declared actual physical presence for at least 1095 days, it appears that CIC has at least some concerns, if not overt doubts, that you were actually present in Canada all those days. It is not likely you can find out why CIC has such concerns, at least not before a hearing is scheduled (and perhaps not even then). You can, however, review your case for yourself, being brutally objective looking for gaps in proof of place of abode or proof of employment, or such, to see if you can find the weak spot in your case, and then prepare to address that if and when a hearing is scheduled. If a hearing is scheduled, my view is that it would be prudent to be assisted by a licensed Canadian lawyer, even though it appears few applicants who attend a CJ hearing actually do this, many of whom are nonetheless successful and are scheduled to take the oath.
