Toronto: More than 4,500 new citizens from over 140 countries were welcomed to Canada at 49 citizenship ceremonies held at Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC)’s office in Scarborough over the past two weeks.
This includes five ceremonies taking place at CIC Scarborough today, which will see a total of approximately 500 people from 63 countries granted citizenship.
Ceremonies like these demonstrate how the government is working to make the citizenship program more efficient, helping more people realize sooner their dream of becoming Canadian. The government’s proposed changes in Bill C-24, the Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act, will also reduce wait times by streamlining the decision-making process for citizenship. It is expected that these changes will bring the average processing time for citizenship applications down to under one year and that the current backlog will be reduced by more than 80 percent by 2015-2016.
