Canadian citizenship what does it mean

Online application: Citizenship certificate You can check your application status in your account opens in a new tab. Your application status will tell you where we are with processing your application, including when we make a decision.

You need a Chrome opens in a new tab , Safari opens in a new tab or Firefox opens in a new tab web browser to access your account. You can also see the progress for each section of your application. Physical presence opens in a new tab Citizenship test opens in a new tab Citizenship ceremony opens in a new tab. Was this answer useful? Yes No. This right can take the form of participation in federal, provincial and municipal elections as a voter.

It can also mean running for election or participating in the management of the different levels of government that exist in Canada. Becoming a Canadian citizen also provides access to a number of jobs that require a high level of security, such as jobs at the federal level. In addition, Canadian law allows for dual or multiple citizenships. This means that once a person becomes a Canadian citizen, they do not have to choose between their new citizenship and that of their country of origin.

As well, children born in Canada to parents who are Canadian citizens become Canadian citizens without having to go through an application process. Finally, Canadian citizens hold a passport, which makes it easier for them to travel to many countries without a visa and makes it simpler to obtain visas if necessary.

A passport also reduces the risk of encountering problems when entering Canada. There are various eligibility criteria that an individual must meet in order to apply for Canadian citizenship:. The Government requests that documents be provided as evidence to support the above eligibility criteria. One might think that by now the transition would be complete, the concept of our citizenship mature.

It is not. It has not kept up with changes in the world around us. Canadian law on citizenship and immigration is in need of another radical revision. The need has two parts. First, we now select immigrants to live in Canada; whether they become citizens is, subject to some minimal conditions, their choice. Instead, we should select immi- grants with the purpose of their becoming, within a few years, citizens or, if by then they prefer, leaving.

Staying without citizenship would not be an option. Second, we now make much of the rights and freedoms of citizens, less of their obligations. In particular, we neglect one that is fundamental and enforceable.

It is to pay, as a condition of maintaining citizenship, a due share of the taxes that maintain Canada; to pay them wherever the citi- zen chooses to live.

Much has already changed since Certainly we have shed the attitude to immigration that Mackenzie King then skilfully articulated. Today most of us are proud to belong to a nation welcoming diverse peoples and accepting their cultures. Yet our silences betray awareness that racial toleration is everywhere still fragile.

Polite political discussion pays min imal attention to immigration. The unspoken disposition is to let well alone, lest any opening be to trouble. Evasion, however, is also risky. The truth is that our success in absorbing immigrants is owed in large part to our requiring little of them.

Present law permits, even encourages, confu- sion of loyalties and plurality of citizenship. The gradual but inevitable consequence is growing plain- er. As we have fewer babies and grow older, and there- by become increasingly dependent on immigration, the sense of a Canadian identity is increasingly diluted. The desperation of the s apart, and even despite the fluctuating Quebec divide since the s, Canadians have hitherto succeeded rather well in satisfying the diver- sity of our continent-wide needs and aspirations.

Today, however, there is an unmistakable sense of political inade- quacy. In face of the crucial economic, environmental and social challenges of the times, our collective action has become faltering.

Clear national needs are neglected, not from lack of awareness but because no coherent national will is directed to them. There is much that we could do better, a good deal that no doubt we will correct. But how much, how soon, depends greatly on what is most fundamental to common action, on our citizenship. No democratic political unit, nation or province or city, thrives without some widely shared sense of community, of some things done differently because they are done together.

Without that, action for the common good is submerged in conflicts of inter- est and differences of opinion. In the beginning, in the escape from colonies to nation, what it meant to be Canadian was plain. It was to be different from American. As the United States emerged from its bloody civil war, and found purpose in the manifest destiny of rolling west and potentially north, determination to have no part of it was equally strong in the British and the French.

That was not enough, however, to build an economy from sea to sea. Farmers from a cold climate were need- ed to break the prairie sod.

It was immi- gration from central Europe that made it possible for Quebec and the old British colonies to grow into a nation-state. The peopling of the West also cre- ated, however, a society more like the United States than Toronto and Quebec had been. Canada started soon on the path of diminishing economic differ- ences that technology has since so greatly accelerated. And we remained a dynamic economy. In the midth cen- tury, particularly, remarkable and diver- sified growth called for many new workers.

At first they came from Britain, northwestern Europe, the Mediter- ranean, but transatlantic prosperity soon diminished those sources of entre- preneurial and managerial talents as well as of professional and skilled work- ers. The temper of the s in any case called for openness to all peoples, who have since come especially from south and east Asia. It is, however, a new imperative that drives their numbers.

Canadians have become much less productive of offspring. Our fertility rate is barely two-thirds of the population replace- ment level. It is economic stability, not growth, that now calls for a lot of immigrants. Canadians are, of course, far from unique in their low fertility. But our population is already slight in rela- tion to our resources. Smaller numbers would damagingly increase the burden of infrastructure overheads imposed by our geography. They would reduce the economies of scale possible for an economy whose manufacturing and service sectors are already challenged by the development of countries such as Brazil, China, India.

Much as the world as a whole will eventually bene- fit from lower birth rates, it will be a long time before both economic and social pressures cease to call for migra- tion to Canada, migration substantial in relation to our otherwise declining population.

Our problem is that economic need now brings an internal social strain. It does not have to do so, but it will as long as we fail to reinforce our faltering sense of common purpose. We are a North American society, sharing many characteristics with our neighbour. But we have combined them with a stronger sense of commu- nity concerns.

One aspect of this was brought home to me by the stellar Canadian in world affairs. Reminiscing over an after-work Scotch, Lester B. Pearson once told me that in all his international dealings, and unilingual though he was, the people with whom he felt most at home were neither American nor British, but northern Europeans. That was close to 50 years ago, in a different world.