Razan Abu-Ghoush filed her Canadian citizenship application on July 2, 2024. Two years later, she’s still waiting.
That shouldn’t be happening. IRCC’s own published processing-time data shows citizenship grants — the standard path for permanent residents applying to naturalize — have been improving this year, even as the separate citizenship-by-descent queue has ballooned. Application decisions are currently estimated at about 12 months, and IRCC says it met that standard in 86 percent of cases last year.
Abu-Ghoush’s file, obtained through two access to information requests filed ten months apart, along with her correspondence with her Member of Parliament’s office, tells a different story than the one she’s been given.
“It’s very, very frustrating. The expected timeline they say on the website is 12 months. Now it’s over doubled, and I’ve lost a lot of opportunities because of this. I was working, and I had opportunities to grow — the job required me to travel to the U.S. more than once, and I couldn’t go. I did everything legally. I did everything by the book. So why is this happening?”
“With a third party”
For more than a year, Abu-Ghoush has been told her delay comes down to a security review. In July 2025, a staffer in the office of her MP, Kristina Tesser Derksen, wrote to her: “the security assessment is typically handled by third-party services (e.g. RCMP and CSIS) which may be the contributing factor to the delays on this application.” Later messages pointed to “IRCC’s partners overseas” and cited a shrinking queue — 36,400 people ahead of her in October 2025, 30,300 by January.
Her government notes, known as Global Case Management System, or GCMS records (shared with New Canadian Media), tell a narrower story. Her RCMP screening came back clear within six weeks of filing — “No Reportable Trace,” dated August 15, 2024. What her file flags instead, repeatedly, starting that same summer, is a residency question: officers couldn’t verify how many days she’d actually spent in Canada before becoming a permanent resident in 2020.
Resolved, and never mentioned
That question too got resolved. Across two video interviews from Jordan in early and mid-2025, Abu-Ghoush walked officers through old passport stamps, a foreign bank statement, and photos of herself in Ontario dated across 2020. On August 6, 2025, an officer weighed all of it against Canada Border Services entry-exit records and concluded her residency claim held up “on a balance of probability.” Her file was marked passed.
Nobody told her.
Twelve days later, her MP’s office reported back what an IRCC agent had said: “The knowledge, language, residency and criminality assessments have passed. The security assessment is in progress.” That much lines up with her file.
But the file’s security section isn’t marked “in progress” — it’s blank, and has been the entire time. It’s impossible to say from the documents alone whether that reflects a genuine, separate screening process running outside GCMS, or a stock answer given regardless of what’s actually happening. IRCC didn’t resolve that either way when asked.
What’s clear is that issues that had been resolved kept being used as reasons for the delay. As recently as February 2026, her online tracker told her IRCC was “waiting on you” for additional information — something she says IRCC itself has confirmed, more than once, is not true.
What IRCC says
Asked generally whether the department updates applicants or MPs’ offices when an internal question is resolved, IRCC was direct: “IRCC will not proactively reach out to an MP’s office or to an applicant to report that an internal eligibility requirement has been met.” Applicants find out only if they, or their MP ask.
Asked whether IRCC checks that the explanations it gives match what’s in an applicant’s own file, the answer was equally direct: “IRCC does not track this data.”
IRCC also couldn’t say how many applications are currently stuck past 24 months, or why: “We do not possess a statistical breakdown by reason(s) for delay,” the department said, adding that timing depends partly on “how well and how quickly applicants respond” to requests — a line that shifts some responsibility back onto the applicant. In Abu-Ghoush’s case, the record shows she answered everything asked of her.
What’s still unexplained
One eligibility component, a check for legal prohibitions, was marked “not started” for more than a year, which was confirmed in April by her MP’s office — though her own tracker now shows it is “in progress,” a change that is not indicated in the correspondence she has. IRCC’s response didn’t address the gap.
The cost of pushing further
There’s a legal backdrop to all this. In a recent Federal Court decision, Manes v. Canada, a judge dismissed a bid for court-ordered action, finding the applicant — not IRCC — responsible for her own delay.
Abu-Ghoush’s file is the rarer kind: a paper trail showing she met every request made of her, while the explanations she received didn’t match what her own notes say was happening.
Testing that in court costs $3,000 to $7,000 in legal fees. On May 6, she sent IRCC a formal demand for a decision within 30 days, warning she’d pursue legal action otherwise. IRCC never replied.
So she is still waiting, even though her case has already met all of IRCC’s requirements. She only knows this after obtaining her own file through access to information laws. Meanwhile, IRCC still won’t explain why a decision has not been made.
Shilpashree Jagannathan is a Hamilton-based freelance journalist and editor whose work has appeared in CBC News, New Canadian Media, The Margin, Business Insider, TRT World and Mint, and has been republished by The Walrus. She reports on immigration, labour, affordability, housing, elections, climate impacts and social justice, focusing on how policy and power shape the lives of households, workers, newcomers and local communities. Drawing on more than a decade in business journalism in India and a strong background in investigations, research and editorial work, she brings rigour and empathy to stories that trace the gap between policy and lived experience. She has also appeared on podcasts and radio programs to discuss her reporting and its broader public-policy implications.
