The Canadian Mint
Not a teething toy.
Some of our earliest readers may recall that SFBaby is Canadian by birthright and that she embarked on the process of filing for her Canadian citizenship documentation a really long time ago.
Unlike her American passport, which arrived in a record-setting nine days, it took…well, substantially longer to get her little laminated card from the Great White North.
For those of you who care about such things, the timeline for the submission process looked something like this:
- 4/17/2008: Dropped off application at Canadian Consulate General in San Francisco
- 5/9/2008: Application received at the processing office in Canada (by stagecoach?)
- 2/23/2009: Processing office begins review of application
- 3/9/2009: Citizenship certificate issued and sent to San Francisco consulate (apparently by carrier pigeon?)
- 4/6/2009: Certificate received by San Francisco consulate and re-forwarded by certified mail
- 4/9/2009: Certificate received at SFDad HQ!
Total processing time: 357 days, or just under 12 months. When SFDad submitted the application last year, the consulate indicated delays between 11 and 16 months, so at least their estimate was right on the money.
Now that we have the certificate in our hands, we observe that it feels the teeniest bit janky for something that we had to wait so long to get. It’s a credit-card sized piece of laminated piece paper with the same funky picture that we used for SFBaby’s American passport. Compared to the US permanent resident card (“green card”)—which has holograms, fingerprints, and a crazy CD-like optical storage panel on the back—this holy grail of Canadian citizenship looks decidedly low-tech.
While we would ordinarily congratulate ourselves on getting this far, the sad reality is that nothing particularly useful can be done with this certificate. It’s too small to frame, it’s not good for travel, and you can’t do much of anything with it…except use it to apply for a Canadian passport. We are just chomping at the bit to find out how long that takes.
Tags: application, backlog, canada, canadian, certificate, citizenship, passport, processing time
You know, it’s all those PEOPLE in Canada that slow these processes down! (We’ve always though that that Canada Post used camels). Incidentally, the Canadian permanent residence card is decidedly high tech as well. Congratulations on reaching the next level in donkey kong.