Hello! I have been a PR now since April 2016 (US citizen). I never thought I would apply for Canadian citizenship but now changing my mind, issue is I never kept a travel journal. We live near a border town and cross into the US a lot for shopping (for a few hours) and vacations. How do I calculate my time as I could not even begin to guess how many times since 2016 I have crossed the border? Sometimes it is once a week sometimes twice.....
Do I need to just start now and wait and apply in 3 years?
Again I never thought I would even apply for citizenship but now have just bought my first house here and thinking it would be easier to apply for citizenship than renewing my PR every 5 years.
Thanks!
While some small omissions are OK if the applicant is clearly well-settled in Canada and applies with a substantial margin over the minimum, applicants really need to make a diligent, concerted effort to report
ALL trips abroad,
including day trips to the U.S. A big margin over the minimum can probably assure a positive outcome for an applicant who upfront acknowledges some estimating of the travel dates, but there is probably a significant to high risk of RQ-related non-routine processing and significant delays, and the RQ-procedure stuff can be rather inconvenient and it tends to be very intrusive into one's privacy.
There are ways to reconstruct travel history which might not be perfect (personally keeping record is of course the one and ONLY for sure source), but with some focused effort and then waiting to have a bigger than usual margin, that should suffice.
It is easy to make a request to CBSA for a history of entries into Canada. This will not necessarily be complete but for many it is complete and for most it should be very near complete. So that should give you most of the dates you returned to Canada.
It has been a long while since I requested comparable records from the U.S. and others here are more familiar with that procedure (I submitted a request well before applying for citizenship but did not get the U.S. records until several months after I took the oath; but that was about six years ago). As I understand it, U.S. citizens still are limited to a FOIA request which can take some time. If you always traveled in the same vehicle or two, those records are similarly likely to be either complete (showing dates of entry into the U.S.) or close to complete.
Best to NOT rely entirely on those records. Better to also do your homework, and that means really doing the work, and correlate trips with other records, such as credit card statements showing purchases in the U.S. (I almost always use a credit card to gas up just before driving back into Canada, for example, so if I needed to reconstruct my U.S. travel history I could easily correlate those purchases with trips into the States.)
One of the problems U.S. citizens applying for Canadian citizenship can encounter is that unlike records for other PRs, Canada cannot directly access U.S. records of entry into the U.S. from the U.S. (This may be or already is changing, I believe, but as I understand it that will only make the information going forward available, not past information.) So if IRCC has any concerns about the U.S. citizen's travel history, it cannot directly verify dates of entry into the U.S.
While I have not closely followed timelines for U.S. citizens applying for Canadian citizenship for a long while, it is my impression that they tend to either go very smoothly with the faster groups of non-routinely processed applicants generally, or they get bogged down in this or that queue waiting for someone at IRCC to more thoroughly review the applicant's travel history and physical presence. A near perfect travel history may be the most significant factor favouring the faster group.
Given the typical hassle of crossing the border in recent years (even with Nexus the wait time in traffic lines has gotten dismally slow, at least at most of the major crossing locations), and given how poorly the Loonie has fared against the U.S. dollar (tending to somewhat discourage U.S. shopping), very-frequent casual crossings (in contrast, say, to frequent border crossing related to employment or some other activity that involves regularly crossing the border) may stir some curiosity. How much so I do not know. Border crossing numbers are down by the millions, but as I recall that may only be a small percentage.
Side-note: since the U.S. IRS form for taking the foreign deduction usually requires reporting dates one traveled in the U.S., it is a bit surprising you were not keeping track of U.S. trips totally apart from needing such records for Canadian citizenship. And of course PRs also have to report travel abroad when renewing their PR card, so the travel history is needed for that as well. I am well aware how inconvenient the record keeping is. And one grows weary of doing the U.S. tax returns, especially for anyone running their own business (accounting in two currencies is time consuming or costly if hired done, prone to error, and simply a drag), for a zero due amount; and then there is the annual FBAR reporting for every bank and investment account with which one has virtually any connection. The U.S. digs its tentacles in deep and tends to not let go.
