Do former refugees need a police certificate for citizenship application?

[canadian_potato]

Hi guys, I'm a former Syrian refugee who's been in Canada for 3 years and it's time for me to apply for citizenship. However, I lived in Malaysia before I was resettled to Canada, and reading about the citizenship application it seems that I need to get a police certificate from Malaysia because I lived for at least a year in Malaysia in the past 4 years. My Syrian passport expired back in 2016 and I can't renew it for obvious reasons, but the problem is when I try to get the police certificate from Malaysia they require a valid passport, which I do not have. I even tried to put in a future expiry date for my Syrian passport just to see if it goes through and submitted the application, but then received an email the next day saying that the application was rejected citing unverifiable documents. In the citizenship application they ask you to explain why you can't get a police certificate, so I explained that it is literally impossible to get one due to aforementioned reasons, do you think that would be enough for IRCC? Has any one had a similar experience before? Any advice is greatly appreciated.