Changes to the Citizenship Act

Will the 4 years residency rule apply to everyone to become a citizen or just those who get their PR after the law comes into effect?

I'm going to assume that it's applied to anyone submitting an application after the date the changes come into effect, so for any application made after the date the applicant needs to have been resident as a Permanent Resident for 4 years in the preceding 6.

That would be complete non sense! I hope someone challenges them if they apply the new law on everyone retrospectively. It would surely make sense for new PR applicants but the existing residents made the move to Canada to become Canadians after residing here for 3 years not 4, so they shouldn't be subjected to the change in law.

Hmm , you don't remember the great FSW backlog that happened in the early 2000s when CIC changed the laws and applied them to people who had already applied and paid, then?

I think law suits and the like ensued but in the end CIC won.

(waiting for someone to correct my hazy memory of this)

Generally speaking, when CIC makes changes, they apply the rule to applications in a particular category received after x date, and they usually allow a bit of time. I know the UK has done this as well.

So once the new residency changes come into effect (I suspect on 1 July, but just my own guess), then any application filed on or after 1 July 2015 will have to adhere to the new residency requirement. (Mr Schnooks and I are proceeding on the assumption that by the time he qualifies, the rule will be 4 in 6.)

The UK did something similar last year with their citizenship requirements... they never had a language requirement to get citizenship. They announced a change to that, so that applications received after 28 October 2013 had to have the new language requirement met; applications filed before did not. Needless to say, there was a rush in the weeks leading up to that point (myself included!).

Parliament chose to not to make any exception for those who are already PR. Not sure what basis such "legal challenge" could have. Contrary to popular myth, the courts are not there to act as an alternative legislature or pronounce on the merits of legislation. They could of course declare a law unconstitutional - however, there is no constitutional entitlement for permanent residents to progress to Canadian citizenship.

This was announced in the middle of last year, there are already lots of threads about it if you want to do a search?

But yes, it will be instantly applicable to anybody applying once the changes are introduced.

HTH.