US citizen applying for Canadian citizenship

A few comments to your specific statements/questions below:

Edited by canuck25 - 23 Apr 2013 at 1:47pm

I have read the article you are referring to and don't quite understand why the applicant is concerned about travelling outside of Canada. The CIC only asks you to inform them of your travel if you are leaving the country for more than 2 weeks - and the request is based simply out of caution that you may miss some mail from them while away. 

I think the responses given by canuck25 are excellent and I largely concur in them.

And I doubt there will be any significant problems, although there is always some risk of RQ and the burdensome inconvenience and delays that entails.

Nonetheless, I'd further offer the following:

If you can obtain both the U.S. and CBSA travel records that should really help you at least identify all or nearly all trips -- going back four years Canada was not capturing all land entries, so the CBSA records for a U.S. citizen can easily be incomplete; even for the U.S. entries, they were not yet recording every entry for U.S. citizens, so those too may not be complete. But you should be able to compare what you get with your own memory and records to reconstruct nearly all trips and be relatively close as to dates.

Note: old credit card statements and bank statements should help refresh your memories to a large extent, at least in being able to pin down the occurrence of a trip and some dates associated with that trip. Doing the homework is worthwhile because it very well may make the difference between getting RQ or not; for most in this situation, getting RQ should not be problematic, just a delay, but given how long he has been living in Canada it is worth knowing that if he does get RQ, unfortunately it will ask for all travel going back to the date of coming to Canada to live. Note, then, because of this, if the PR application was an out-of-Canada application, he probably should report the date of landing as the date he came to live in Canada (so in case there is RQ he only has to go back to the date of landing) -- no reason to confuse things by saying he had come to live in Canada when he was a "visitor" prior to the date of landing, even though he was staying in Canada indefinitely during that time. However, if it was an in-Canada PR application (your PR processing timeline suggests the possibility of this to me, since most sponsored partner apps for U.S. citizens back then were taking way less than a year let alone 14 months), probably best to use the date you indicated you began living together in Canada in that application.

Personally I would use the online residence calculator and make a note in the box for entering the "reason" for the trip indicating the dates are a best recollection (in addition to a brief explanation of reason for trip -- for U.S. trips I also noted the particular city and state I traveled to). This way you will be sure to identify what dates are approximate or best recollection versus those you are certain about.

As canuck25 and Danforth Jones both indicate, neither have I seen any evidence to suggest that U.S. citizens are given RQ more than PRs from other countries. I do not know, but I suspect it is less.

That said, historically applicants with residential ties or work history in the U.S., and those with partners or dependents living or working in the U.S., and those whose partner is a U.S. citizen, have appeared to be at higher risk for RQ.

U.S. citizen applicants with continued employment ties in the U.S. also appear to have a higher risk of RQ.

Overall, since you have been patient this long, and depending on how well you can reconstruct the travel dates, I would lean toward getting both the U.S. and CBSA records before applying, and probably before applying to renew the PR card as well. I think it was a bit of a mistake to not have renewed the PR card (not too bad of one, but . . . well, should have gotten the PR card renewed). There is no overt indication that an expired PR card or a recently renewed one is a trigger for RQ, but I have the sense that one expired this long is a significant factor that could elevate the risk of RQ significantly; and I also have the sense that renewing after an extended time of it being expired and just before applying for citizenship is something that will draw attention of the raising questions sort. So, overall even though some mistakes in the declaration of travel abroad should not be problematic (and certainly not relative to the ultimate outcome), in conjunction with other factors like the expired PR card, the risk of RQ goes up, and RQ is a real inconvenience (intrusive into one's privacy and quite a lot of work . . . especially for someone who will have to report at least back mid 2006), so if you can fashion the application to minimize RQ risks you want to.

All that said, even if given RQ there is probably a very low risk of a problem regarding the final outcome.

Crossing the border without a valid PR card should be no different after applying than before.    

CIC tends (so far as I have discerned) to give little weight to declarations from family or friends; if an applicant is given RQ, though, and despite CIC's dismissive attitude toward them, if they are statutory declarations (sworn to before a notary or other official authorized to administer oaths) a Citizenship Judge has to consider them and, in fact, is obligated to accept them as true statements unless there is evidence of record tending to controvert them. They are easy to submit and provide some insurance.

I suspect the timelines are on their way back down from what they have been for the last year. I could have applied well over a year ago and am glad I waited until this spring to do so . . . I will probably get RQ but either way I have a strong sense things will go better having waited . . . those who applied between September 2011 (I met the qualifications around that time and could have applied then), through most of last year, seem to have been unluckily caught in the crossfire of changes, fraud interdiction, and increased applications.

One of the reasons I try to give back a lot to this forum is that it was here that I learned I could make my sponsored PR application outside-Canada even though at the time I was applying I was in Canada, I had a visitor record to stay in Canada and was staying in Canada with my sponsoring partner. At that time the inland timeline was up to over a year and a half, whereas I got my visa in just a little over four months after sending the app to Mississauga; never left Canada while the application was pending.

I do not know that you would need to wait a full year. In fact, I think things are going to improve significantly for well-qualified applicants getting RQ, so applying sooner and getting RQ should not result in an overall timeline any longer and maybe significantly shorter than waiting another year to apply. (In this respect my view is a bit different than that expressed by canuck25; it does seem, though, that what canuck25 said about the RQ timeline growing longer is true for those not given a file review.)

And in this regard, the thing is there are so many factors which can trigger RQ, to some extent it is not worth trying to navigate around the risks -- main reason in his instance is how burdensome the RQ would be given the extent to which they ask for information as of the date the applicant arrived in Canada to live. They even ask for day trips in the RQ! But you could wait a year to apply and still get RQ.

Overall, as I said, things should turn out OK, just a matter of how much hassle in the meantime and how long it takes.

Side note: I have a friend who similarly has been a PR for over four decades, sometimes thinks about applying for citizenship but never does. He became a PR at a time when Canada required new citizens to renounce prior citizenships and by the time the law changed he simply was used to being a PR . . . carrying a passport from a country (not the U.S. though) which facilitates easy international travel makes a difference.