Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) is closing citizenship applications of unresponsive applicants in an effort to reduce its backlog and speed up application processing.

A new article by Postmedia News lists some factors that could be used to determine which applications are dormant:

Citizenship and Immigration will shut the files of those who fail to attend multiple scheduled citizenship tests or interviews. Applications submitted on or after April 17, 2009 will also be considered dormant and closed if applicants fail to provide proof of residency after receiving two notices to do so from the government.

CIC spokeswoman Andrea Khanjin told Postmedia News that 54,000 citizenship applicants did not show up for their citizenship test in just the last three years and that CIC estimates about 12,000 files will be closed soon under the new procedures.

Khanjin said that citizenship application processing will favour those who make an effort to comply with the process requirements over those who do not:

“Those who take their citizenship seriously will not have to wait in line behind those that don’t bother showing up to their citizenship test, interview, or who don’t respond to a residence questionnaire. The citizenship application process has been bogged down for too long by those that do not take Canadian citizenship seriously.”

Citizenship application processing times have increased in recent years, from 12 to 15 months in 2008 to 23 months in April of this year, leading to more funding being allotted by the federal government for citizenship application processing and, now, an effort to cut down the backlog of 350,000 applications by closing dormant files.