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Canadian citizenship application – DUI conviction, no probation, fine fully paid, IRCC requesting fingerprints and referring to sections 21/22
I am a Canadian permanent resident and submitted my citizenship application in
June 2025. I recently received a letter from IRCC requesting that I provide fingerprints within 30 days.
The letter says that IRCC had previously requested my fingerprints but did not receive confirmation that they had been taken. It also states:
“After a review of the biographical information provided in your application, it appears that there are questions to clarify regarding your application in relation to sections 21 and/or 22 of the Citizenship Act.”
In general, better to pose questions about qualifying for a grant of Canadian citizenship in the part of the forum specifically about citizenship.
BUT for questions like this, regarding the impact of criminal charges, best to get advice from a reputable, competent Canadian immigration lawyer who has experience handling cases involving PRs charged with criminal offences (might be better to get input from both an immigration and criminal defense lawyer).
Of course it would have been prudent to fully consider the impact of the conviction with an immigration lawyer before making an application for citizenship, but you are beyond that now.
What I can offer:
Your PR status could be at risk, let alone your application for citizenship. This is because a conviction for driving while impaired constitutes inadmissibility on grounds of serious criminality (
even if prosecuted as a summary offence). How this will impact you and your citizenship application will depend on the particular details, ranging from when the offence and conviction occurred, to how you responded to the prohibitions questions in the application.
At the risk of being irritatingly repetitive: best to discuss this with a lawyer you have paid to review your situation.
Particular Questions:
1. Has anyone received a similar IRCC letter mentioning sections 21 and/or 22 after a past DUI conviction?
Probably, but this has not been widely reported in this forum. In the past IRCC requested the applicant to provide copies of the official court records. This is not just about whether you were subject to probation but also about whether the DWI charge itself results in a prohibition. See below for more observations about the latter.
2. If there was no probation and the fine was fully paid, did the citizenship application eventually proceed normally?
For those with a DWI conviction, it appears some (perhaps many) applicants became citizens; most of these probably ran into some level of complex processing and related delays, while some applications may have been processed more or less "
normally." But this is one of those issues for which anecdotal reports can be misleading; how it went for another PR applying for citzenship will not say much about how this will go for you, only what is one way it might go.
3. How IRRC will deal with my application?
In the abstract (that is, without reviewing the details of your case in particular, details which probably should
not be shared in an open source such as this forum), it is very difficult to predict what IRCC will do. You might anticipate complex processing of your citizenship application, so that at minimum it might take significantly longer than most applications. Maybe little or no problem. But since IRCC has already identified and focused on the issue, some level of complex processing probably should be expected. In large part it depends on the particular details in your case, but it can also depend on IRCC practices (internal processing guidelines) which are not shared with the public, and on the subjective exercise of discretion by a total stranger bureaucrat.
To be clear, as noted, the worst case scenario could be inadmissibility proceedings leading to the loss of PR status and deportation.
I do not know the extent to which IRCC actually proceeds with inadmissibility proceedings against PRs based on a single conviction for an indictable offence which was prosecuted as a summary offence (such as for charges like driving while impaired) resulting in no imprisonment (suggesting a relatively minor offence). Based on published decisions we know that in some cases IRCC does pursue inadmissibility in such cases.
However, if IRCC was pursuing inadmissibility in most of these cases, those involving PRs, whether or not they are applying for citizenship, we would expect to see this issue come up more often in the forum (especially in the "
Settlement in Canada" section of the forum, in particular in the discussions about Permanent Residency Obligations as well as those about Citizenship).
Further Explanation:
Since you have been convicted of an indictable offence punishable by up to ten years imprisonment (assuming you were convicted of the Federal driving while impaired offence,
Section 320.14(1) of the Criminal Code, for which, as prescribed in Section 320.19(1), a person may be sentenced to imprisonment "
for a term of not more than ten years"), you are at risk of having inadmissibility proceedings brought against you, which could result in the loss of your PR status, which would terminate your eligibility for citizenship.
The fact that the indictable offence was prosecuted as a summary offence does not eliminate this risk. The key statutory provision is
Section 36 IRPA, subsections 36(1)(a) and subsections 36(3)(a) in particular, which respectively provide:
A permanent resident or a foreign national is inadmissible on grounds of serious criminality for . . .
having been convicted in Canada of an offence under an Act of Parliament punishable by a maximum term of imprisonment of at least 10 years, or of an offence under an Act of Parliament for which a term of imprisonment of more than six months has been imposed (Section 36 (1)(a) IRPR)
an offence that may be prosecuted either summarily or by way of indictment is deemed to be an indictable offence, even if it has been prosecuted summarily (Section 36 (3)(a) IRPA)
If IRCC initiates inadmissibility proceedings (you would get notice of course), then for sure lawyer-up.
Again, despite these provisions, and despite knowing that IRCC has pursued inadmissibility proceedings in some such cases, we do not see many reports or questions here about this, which we would expect to see more of if IRCC did this in most such cases. It is possible the risk is low. But given the severity of the consequences (potential loss of PR status), this is a risk to be aware of.
Other Ways This Could Go:
Complex processing and delay is probably the main risk.
Even as to this, as to how much risk there is, and how much delay it might cause, there is a lot of uncertainty. It is entirely possible that IRCC will confirm the specific details of the criminal prosecution, and in that confirm there was no probation and that there is no applicable prohibition, so that there is only a relatively short delay in proceeding to finalize your application and schedule you to take the oath.
Two aspects of the case could have a big impact:
-- was there in fact really NO probation period?
-- does the IRPR provision prescribing that even though the offence was prosecuted as a summary offence it is considered an indictable offence apply for purposes of whether the conviction constitutes a prohibition (for four years)?
In regards to "
no probation," as already noted, if in fact there was no probation this will not be a problem. That said, I apprehend the possibility there could have been, technically, a period of informal probation imposed which might not have been clearly explained to you. What is in the official court records will determine this.
My sense is that the conviction itself does not constitute a prohibition under Section 22(2). The IRPR provision specifically governs just the application of the IRPR definition of inadmissibility, so I would not expect it to apply to what constitutes a prohibition under the Citizenship Act. But I am not a Canadian lawyer and otherwise I am not familiar with actual cases in which this is addressed. BUT that said, the conviction itself could result in your application going into a queue for further examination, which might include obtaining official court records. This could result in a significant delay in processing, not because that itself would take much time but because the application could sit idle in a lengthy queue waiting for this to be done.
The latter could involve suspending processing of your application pursuant to Section 13.1 in the Citizenship Act, which provides that processing the application can be suspended "
for as long as is necessary to receive . . . information or evidence or the results of any investigation or inquiry for the purpose of ascertaining . . . whether the applicant should be the subject of an admissibility hearing . . . or whether section 22 applies . . . "
