u/Primary-Coffee5423

Happy Sunday fellow Canadians!

Well, it’s been seven weeks since I last posted. At that time, there was a lot of confusion and not much optimism as we sorted through what was known and unknown about the surrender letters. A few weeks ago it looked like we started having some movement on the spreadsheet, but I wanted to wait a while to make sure it really looked like a trend that approvals are moving along. So here’s what it looks like after many weeks with very little movement on the spreadsheet:

Week of July 27th: 9 approvals
Week of August 3rd: 17 approvals
Week of August 10th: 17 approvals so far

So a total of 43 approvals in the last three weeks - 10 of which are pre-C3.

A few things to be cautious about when interpreting this: (1) Prior to the suspension letters we were averaging between 20 and 30 approvals per week, so the approval rates recently may still be a little low relative to approval rates before. But they seem to be picking up. (2) These numbers also include what appears to be families applying together. So 17 approvals is most certainly a mix of a few larger families applying together and other individuals applications… not 17 unique individual applications.

So here are my four reasons to be optimistic this week:

1. Approvals have resumed. Hopefully that means there has been some retraining at the IRCC and they have clear guidelines and protocols moving forward that should help us as applicants as well as the agents who are working to approve applications.

2. Summer is coming to a close. It is well known that within Canadian bureaucratic agencies, vacation times are much more common in the summer. So we could see an increase in approvals sometime in September as more agents return to work.

3. We now have several weeks of data showing that the deluge of applications that we saw in March and April have tapered off. The upward trend of applications in March was substantial and exponential. If it kept moving at that pace for a while, it looked like we would all be stuck for years and years. After several weeks of declining application numbers, it appears that there was a “glut“ of applications during that time. It was probably a combination of the most motivated people finding out about it around the same time, taking a few months to collect documents, and finally applying. That’s when I applied as well. The sharp decline and plateauing of applications is good news for processing times. I know that the times have been increasing on the tracker, but we may see a plateau there as well. I don’t know that for sure, but a future plateau is certainly possible

4. A personal note of optimism for myself is that a family member has been approved. I had been working with this family member on collecting documents for our G0. They applied two weeks before I did. I know that doesn’t mean I’m going to be approved in the next few weeks, but it does mean that the IRCC accepted the same documents that I submitted for my Canadian ancestor as “proof.“

OK, it’s good to be back. Hope you all have a great week and let’s hope that the IRCC keeps the coffee warm this week so they can approve a record number of applications!

Happy Sunday fellow Canadians!

I started doing these weekly updates based on spreadsheet movement. And while there are things changing on the spreadsheet, there really isn’t much movement. We know from Minister Diab’s statements that processing has come to a screeching halt. And our spreadsheet reflects that. There were no approvals this last week. I doubt that the IRCC will publicly announce when they start processing again, so we’ll just have to keep an eye on the spreadsheet.

If there’s something to be optimistic about this week it could be that Wednesday is Canada Day - and given that Canada Day and Independence Day are in the same week. I ordered a dual citizen flag from Amazon. The left side is American flag. The right side is a Canadian flag. My family is having a celebration on Wednesday. Nothing big. Just grilling… but I also ordered ketchup chips and “All Dressed Up” chips. We will also make Nanaimo bars and butter tarts. I’m going to head to a liquor store and see if they carry Molson or LaBatt Blur beer. Unless they have some kind of cool Canadian micro brew, but I live in the south so I’m not holding out hope for that.

Anyway, given that no new data is coming through for a while, I may take a sabbatical for my Sunday contributions. But I am grateful for all of the folks in this sub Reddit who have done their best to keep us informed and be supportive of one another.

Happy early Canada Day!

Happy Sunday fellow Canadians!

And Happy Father’s Day to any other fathers out there. I got a Father’s Day surprise today and found out that one of my adult children just discovered that their partner also has a Canadian ancestor. They had been considering Canada as a place to start a family - and now I think they might be considering it even more!

Well, I took last week off from the optimism post because there wasn’t a whole lot of optimism in the group with news of the suspension emails. One optimistic thing that happened this last week was that several of these folks got… unsuspended? Anyway, I’m happy for those who have their certificates back. Hopefully the rest get resolved soon. Needless to say, it’s been a wild couple of weeks. Lots of news coverage and even some discussion in Canadian Parliament.

To get us caught up on approvals, the week of 6/8 was actually pretty good with 33 approvals. Nine of which were pre-C3. Last week, however, only had two approvals. That is worst week for approvals we have seen on the spreadsheet since the week of December 29, 2025. The suspended certificates likely played apart in this. It could be that the IRCC diverted resources to dealing with those. Another idea could be that they diverted resources into updating their website. I suspect there has been quite a bit of training or retraining going on the last week which required putting a halt to most applications until they got it sorted out. I work in a somewhat bureaucratic, large organization. Any major change in procedure requires lots and lots of meetings. I think the agents were likely very busy with Zoom meetings for part of last week. Of course, it’s speculation, but that seems very likely.

Another interesting bit of news was seeing a clip of Minister Diab questioned by a conservative member of Parliament on how many approvals had gone through. I either did didn’t catch the question correctly or I didn’t catch the context but I thought she said something like 4000. That was shocking to me because that means our spreadsheet represents a much larger proportion of approvals than I had previously thought. But then the IRCC released more formal approval numbers and it looks like our spreadsheet represents only about 3 to 4% of total approvals. And that was about what we had thought all along.

So we are a small but mighty group. Thanks to our spreadsheet creators. And thanks to those who have contributed to the spreadsheet. And if you would like to contribute and haven’t yet, here is the link:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Canadiancitizenship/s/ODNixQ1ht5

I usually do a post on Sunday, but this is not a great weekend for optimism. I know we’re all tense about the letters that people have been emailed from the IRCC after receiving their certificates.

There is a lot we don’t know, but I think we could start to piece together some information. Would it be helpful to include a column on the spreadsheet for receiving the letter? I don’t know how many would go back to the spreadsheet and update their information, but it could be helpful. My thought is that we could see common threads between people who have received it.

Thoughts?

Edit: My guy, PG-Dog made a really good point that we can’t know too much about the association between documentation and receiving the letter unless we know if the documentation was certified. If the spreadsheet doesn’t provide full information on degree of certification, it may not help as much. So it’s debatable as to whether or not the state of collection would be helpful.

Happy Sunday fellow Canadians!

We definitely have something to be optimistic about this week. It was a shorter business week at the IRCC due to a holiday on Monday - so we were prepared for a slower than average week. As of right now, we are a little above average in terms of approvals with 28. Interestingly, 11 of them came from one large family spanning four generations. We also had seven pre-C3 folks get through.

The large family that got approved led me to think about the spreadsheet data in a slightly different way. Our spreadsheet is really just a bunch of rows and columns. And we interpret the data as one row = one person. But we know that people who apply in the same application packet usually get approved all on the same day. So it adds a bit of complexity into thinking about timelines and those sorts of things when trying to demystify this process. I applied with a family of four. I’ve seen people talk about applying in a packet of over one dozen family members. While large family packets probably take a while to get through, it is almost certainly a faster process for a family of four to be approved than four individual applications.

I tried getting more family members to apply with me. Most of them were uninterested, undecided, or had a “I’ll get around to it when I get around to it” sort of mentality. I finally decided that they likely weren’t going to get around to doing it because they didn’t seem terribly motivated. For them, this was kind of a “isn’t this interesting” sort of thing. But then upon finding out they needed to get documents together and take photos with specific dimensions, they were far less interested. This brings me to another point - we are most likely seeing a large wave of highly motivated people applying this first year after the passing of the bill. I do think there’s going to be a drop off. We don’t know exactly when the peak is going to hit but I’ll try to keep watching it to see if there’s any discernible trends for when the number incoming applications consistently decline.

Have a great week!

Long post so buckle up…

This week’s spreadsheet news is absolutely more upbeat! We had an above average week with 28 approvals. Importantly, we had more pre-C3 approvals. There has been a lot of chatter on this platform about the increased number of applicants in front of us according to the online tracker. The prevailing theory is that the Pre-C3 folks got admitted into the mainstream queue. Obviously this is speculation because none of us truly know, but the noticeable increase in C3 approvals give some support to that theory.

Maybe the most quoted part of my post last week was the four year wait time for everyone currently in the spreadsheet. I recalculated and while it hasn’t drastically changed, there is really good reason to think it is going to speed up. So the first thing to note is that this is just a spreadsheet of self-reported data which has all kinds of bias and human error. Secondly, processes change all the time. That could apply to the IRCC at some point. So the current rate of approval isn’t necessarily connected to future rates of approval. It’s just a snapshot in time with the data that we have.

As the weeks go by, I have been tallying the approvals on Sunday. So that means I missed approvals that got added in previous weeks that had already passed because I didn’t go back in time to re-tally once the week was over. Today I decided to go back and recalculate. I’m happy to report that many people who gained approval weeks ago have added their data to the spreadsheet. So my running average of about 20 approvals per week is an underestimate. And the average number of approvals will continue to increase as long as more people who got approved to come back to add to the spreadsheet. It seems there are people in our community who go back and add their information weeks later. This is good! We need as much data as possible.

It may not be a bad idea to go on other social media platforms to find groups dealing with C3 and encourage them to get on the spreadsheet. We especially need people who have already been approved. That’s tricky because it’s easy to see why approval would demotivate people to update the spreadsheet. I plan on updating it when I get my approval, however, I may not do the Sunday optimism posts anymore. I can easily see how that would demotivate me from act actively keeping on top of things. So it might be the same sort of psychological demotivation with folks who get approved. It doesn’t hurt to remind everyone to go back and add or update if they haven’t done so in a while.

That said, I have some updated numbers. Keep in mind, the averages are complicated because it seems the IRCC has been working at different clips over different weeks. I calculated each week starting on Monday. These calculations exclude approvals before C3 was passed because there were so few. The average number of approvals since the first Monday in December is 19.5 per week. The average since January is 22.3 per week. The average since February is 25.7 per week. The average since March is 27.1 per week. There is a dip in the average since April at 23.3 per week. That month, we hit quite a few slow weeks. And so far in May, we have 25 per week. Probably the best aggregated average is since February 9. I picked that Monday because the previous week had single digit approvals. Every week since then has been double digit and seems to be more normalized. The number since that outlier is 27.3 per week. So I think that’s a much more accurate number. And the kicker is, it will keep increasing as more people add their information.

I hope this helps us all be a little more hopeful!

Hello fellow Canadians! There were only three more approvals this week compared to last week, but it means things are still moving. Importantly, out of the 18 that were approved this week, 10 of them were for urgent Pre-C3 apps. Congratulations to those folks. Hopefully that means more of the urgent applications from 2025 are going to start moving through.

It was a big week for new applications. I wondered if maybe we had hit a peak, but I don’t think we have yet.

I think our spreadsheet is probably fairly representative of those who are applying in general. We might skew a little more motivated because we self-selected to go to Reddit and share information. I think we are also heavily skewed towards those who are applying for urgent processing because those folks are probably the most motivated. But statistically speaking, if this is the rate of acceptance that we are seeing in the group, I imagine it’s approximately the rate of acceptance for everyone who is applying.

I’m a statistician. We typically like working with large samples because it means we can assume normality even if a sample isn’t fully representative of the population. We’ve got a sample of 4000 people now. In almost all survey data research, that is a good enough size sample to make some basic assumptions. My take is that the timelines given by the IRCC are most likely not going to be close to correct. Our spreadsheet has about 4200 people and around 400 have been approved. That leaves about 3800 in our spreadsheet waiting for approval. Approval rates have been about 20 per week the last few months. That means that on average, everyone currently in the spreadsheet will be approved within four years. But of course we have to account for the fact that there will be new urgent cases that will push that timeline back. And that’s just kind of how it is. I know that part doesn’t sound optimistic, but the optimism in this process still remains: we now have an opportunity for citizenship that we didn’t have before. I’m thankful for that.

And happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers in our group!

I started to see these in my field. They look interesting, but I noticed that they are only posted for about a month and very late in season. Opening dates for applications in March and even April with closing dates in early May. Jobs need to be filled by July 1. Are these more likely internal hires? With only a month to apply it seems like they wouldn’t get a great pool so late in the season.

OK, I’ll start by saying there’s less to be optimistic about this week. We had 15 approvals, which is half of what we had last week. At least one pre-C3 application got through after over a year in processing.

I would like to think that maybe the IRCC is doing some kind of big training thing this week because they have hired new people and need to onboard a bunch of agents to help get through the ever-growing mass of applications arriving each day. I know that’s likely not the case, but that’s how I choose to be optimistic.

Okay, let’s beam positive energy to the agents up north. Here’s to hoping they all have an extra cup of coffee this week!

While the week started slow, we ended up with 30 approvals. That’s a 50% increase from last week, which doubled the previous week. Importantly, six of our pre-C3 friends made it out with an approval this week.

I am currently in processing with a request for urgent processing. I did a little work with spreadsheet data and it looks like amongst those who applied urgent, at least 50% have been approved for applications that went into processing between 1/26 and 3/22. So that’s kind of where the timeline is right now. Of those that have been approved, the average days to approval (once in processing) have been increasing a bit - likely due to the sharp increase in apps.

Hopefully this is helpful to some of you. Let’s cheer on the IRCC agents this week, and as always, let’s hope they have an extra cup of coffee!