Canadian Citizenship (or “Oy vey, Canada!”)
A newly-minted citizen?
UPDATED 05/13/2009: If you want to know how long things actually took, see here.
UPDATED 05/28/2009: And you may want to see details about the subsequent passport application timing.
As some of you may recall from earlier postings, SFBaby is a dual citizen and she is also Canadian by birthright. Given our relatively good first experiences with the US government, we were hoping that we might be able to acquire B’s Canadian documentation faster than one could sing O Canada!.
Sadly, this has not turned out to be the case, and it took a lot of sorting through contradictory instructions to figure out how to…
even get the ball rolling.
The first question was, of course, where we should even begin. SFDad naively thought that since B was effectively a citizen at birth by virtue of her father, he could just apply for her Canadian passport right away. Not so. Since B was born outside of Canada, before we could even get her passport, we needed something to prove that she was even Canadian at all.
Our first guess was the “apply for canadian citizenship” page on the Immigration Canada website. This turned out to be incorrect, since she is already a citizen and she just needs a way to prove it. That means that our task is to obtain a Certificate of Canadian Citizenship for her. Once she has that, she’ll be able to apply for a Canadian passport.
Unfortunately, life isn’t quite as simple as it should be. We received conflicting and contradictory information from almost all of the sources that we spoke with, and it turns out that the application process has an estimated year and a half backlog!
For those intrepid enough to consider starting the process, here are some of the things you’ll need that are not even addressed in the official application kit for Outside Canada from Immigration Canada.
- proof of the Canadian parent’s (legal) immigration status in the United States. This usually isn’t a big deal.
- two special photos in the “Canadian citizenship format“. The specs are described on the Immigration Canada website, but finding a photographer to shoot them can be either challenging or expensive. Sapphire Photo on Mission Street does a good/cheap job of them here in San Francisco.
- two pieces of government-issued identification for your baby. That’s right, two. One might ask how one can get two pieces of identification for a person who can’t walk? The official answer is that you need to get the baby’s birth certificate (as described in a previous post) and social security card (which you hopefully applied for at the hospital after your kid was born). Although the official application kit says that you need to provide three pieces of ID (a birth certificate and two additional pieces of ID, such as a driver’s license or health insurance card), the consular officers at the Canadian Consulate General of San Francisco tell me that this is waived and that only two pieces are required for infants: one needs only a birth certificate and one additional piece of government-issued ID. Despite what the application kit states, it is worth noting that the health insurance card is not valid since it is not government-issued. (The consular rep tells me that they only accept government-issued ID, and since health insurance is not provided by the government in the US, they won’t take those cards.)
- a notary to notarize all of the copies of the documents that you’ll be sending. This is despite what the official application kit saying about you needing to find one of the people to sign it: “a foreign service officer, a judge, a magistrate, an officer of a court of justice or a commissioner authorized to administer oaths”. I double-confirmed this with the consulate (and even submitted my application in person), and they confirmed that the notary was the correct way to go.
- pay your citizenship certificate application fees online. The official application kit states that you need to pay via money order, but the consulate told me that this was not necessary. Despite all of the warnings on the online payment page about it only being usable by people inside Canada, the consulate told me to pay online anyway since it would give me a receipt number that could be used to track the process of the application online.
When trying to resolve some of the inconsistencies above, I ended up speaking with someone at the consulate down in LA as well. When I asked her about the differences between what she was saying and the information in the official application kit, she said that I was using the wrong application set. I was using the instructions from the “application from outside the country” kit, which is apparently not the correct set to use when applying from outside the country. What the…?
Anyway, after all of the above and getting my documents assembled, I decided to march down to the Consulate General myself and submit in person, with the hopes that a live person would be able to look at my application before I submitted it to see if I made any mistakes. They had a very friendly bulletproof glass window at the end of their waiting room, and after being forced to write the reason for my visit on a piece of paper and passing it through the window, the staff was very helpful and they got everything pushed through correctly.
At that point, I was informed that the processing center in Canada had a 6-month delay in even opening the paperwork, plus a 5-10 month backlog for processing the applications. This means that it could take a year and a half before she gets her certificate (and a couple of months after that for her passport).
The good news is that all of the information is submitted and B is well on her way to becoming a citizen!
Tags: baby, birth certificate, canada, certificate of canadian citizenship, passport, San Francisco, social security number
AHA! I LOVE IT! There is no such thing as an easy application process.