There has been rather little discussion about interviews with Citizenship Officers. These have been part of the process, a NON-routine part of the process, since 2015. There have been occasional references here to being scheduled for an interview or hearing with a Citizenship Officer, but very little follow-up that I have seen.
These interviews are NOT common. Most appear to be triggered by failing the written test for knowledge of Canada. Some triggered by concerns about competency in an official language. One or two references in the forum apparently involved presence-case issues.
Note that this is NOT about the routine Program Integrity (PI) Interview which every applicant has, almost always attendant a test event (even for test-exempt applicants, who are typically scheduled for an interview at the same time and location others are being tested and interviewed).
Again, this has not come up often. I have previously posted observations about the Citizenship Officer interview in a couple or more of those instances. My observations were based largely on PDIs, and the PDI specifically about interviewing adult applicants in particular. (Could not locate those discussions, hence I started this as a new topic.)
A recent Federal Court decision is specifically about such an interview or hearing, and in that case the applicant contested some aspects of the procedure.
The case is Khattab v. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2019 FC 1556 (CanLII) . . . see http://canlii.ca/t/j3szm
A key issue in the case was whether it was a breach of procedural fairness for the Citizenship Officer to, in effect, subject the applicant to a test of language competency notwithstanding the applicant's submission of "objective" documentation establishing sufficient competency based on multiple submissions of LINC results, and particularly so given that the checkbox in the notice for the interview did not have the box for "adequate knowledge of English or French" checked. The Federal Court upheld the IRCC decision denying citizenship for failure to satisfy the Citizenship Officer, orally in the interview, that she met the language requirement.
Not news, since we knew about this procedure, but the Federal Court's ruling verifies its validity. And there are other procedural aspects discussed in this decision which illuminates and clarifies some significant aspects of the procedure . . . including a holding that the label "interview" versus "hearing" is not significant.
A SIGNIFICANT OTHER FEDERAL COURT DECISION:
The decision in Dhatt v. Canada (Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness), 2019 FC 1555 (CanLII) . . . see http://canlii.ca/t/j3sz4 . . . is noteworthy because it illustrates that applying for citizenship can trigger the revival of old issues.
Here too this should be very unusual. The applicant in this case had been convicted and imprisoned in the U.S. for a serious drug offense, but that had been a decade before (he was a Canadian PR apparently engaged as a long-haul truck driver with U.S. routes at the time). He was released from prison and deported, from the U.S., to his home country, and there he applied for a PR TD to return to Canada, which was denied on RO grounds(he spent two plus years in prison in the U.S.), but he was successful in his appeal. So he came to Canada, settled again in Canada, and many years later, after being in Canada with no criminal offenses for many years, he applied for citizenship. That triggered Inadmissibility proceedings for serious criminality based on the offense nearly a decade earlier. He lost.
These interviews are NOT common. Most appear to be triggered by failing the written test for knowledge of Canada. Some triggered by concerns about competency in an official language. One or two references in the forum apparently involved presence-case issues.
Note that this is NOT about the routine Program Integrity (PI) Interview which every applicant has, almost always attendant a test event (even for test-exempt applicants, who are typically scheduled for an interview at the same time and location others are being tested and interviewed).
Again, this has not come up often. I have previously posted observations about the Citizenship Officer interview in a couple or more of those instances. My observations were based largely on PDIs, and the PDI specifically about interviewing adult applicants in particular. (Could not locate those discussions, hence I started this as a new topic.)
A recent Federal Court decision is specifically about such an interview or hearing, and in that case the applicant contested some aspects of the procedure.
The case is Khattab v. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2019 FC 1556 (CanLII) . . . see http://canlii.ca/t/j3szm
A key issue in the case was whether it was a breach of procedural fairness for the Citizenship Officer to, in effect, subject the applicant to a test of language competency notwithstanding the applicant's submission of "objective" documentation establishing sufficient competency based on multiple submissions of LINC results, and particularly so given that the checkbox in the notice for the interview did not have the box for "adequate knowledge of English or French" checked. The Federal Court upheld the IRCC decision denying citizenship for failure to satisfy the Citizenship Officer, orally in the interview, that she met the language requirement.
Not news, since we knew about this procedure, but the Federal Court's ruling verifies its validity. And there are other procedural aspects discussed in this decision which illuminates and clarifies some significant aspects of the procedure . . . including a holding that the label "interview" versus "hearing" is not significant.
A SIGNIFICANT OTHER FEDERAL COURT DECISION:
The decision in Dhatt v. Canada (Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness), 2019 FC 1555 (CanLII) . . . see http://canlii.ca/t/j3sz4 . . . is noteworthy because it illustrates that applying for citizenship can trigger the revival of old issues.
Here too this should be very unusual. The applicant in this case had been convicted and imprisoned in the U.S. for a serious drug offense, but that had been a decade before (he was a Canadian PR apparently engaged as a long-haul truck driver with U.S. routes at the time). He was released from prison and deported, from the U.S., to his home country, and there he applied for a PR TD to return to Canada, which was denied on RO grounds(he spent two plus years in prison in the U.S.), but he was successful in his appeal. So he came to Canada, settled again in Canada, and many years later, after being in Canada with no criminal offenses for many years, he applied for citizenship. That triggered Inadmissibility proceedings for serious criminality based on the offense nearly a decade earlier. He lost.
