Trudo Lemmens, a professor in the University of Toronto’s law faculty, could hardly believe his eyes when he read the letter. After waiting for close to 42 months, he was finally going to become a Canadian citizen.
Until recently, the 49-year-old holder of the Scholl Chair in Health Law and Policy had been one of hundreds of thousands of people caught up in a backlog of applications for Canadian citizenship.
A native of Belgium, he had begun his quest to become a full-fledged Canadian in February 2011. He was relieved to finally take his oath of citizenship on Nov. 5, 2014.
“It was a nice feeling, being able to finally fully participate in all the aspects of civil life,” says Lemmens. “It will be good to vote next year.”
As for the ceremony, it was “very touching,” he says. “You look around in the room; it’s a very multicultural event. It’s a very diverse group of people. You see people who are so proud, taking their picture with the citizenship judge.”
But Lemmens questions why it took so long to get there. Earlier this year, he spoke out about the delay as part of a Toronto Star series on changes to the Citizenship Act.
Lemmens first came to Canada as a student in 1991. After completing his doctorate in 1997, he began teaching health law and bioethics at the University of Toronto — first through a joint appointment at the law faculty and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, and in 1999 in the law faculty alone. Married to a Canadian, he had permanent resident status and didn’t immediately apply for citizenship.
He looked into it a couple of times but found he didn’t meet the residency requirement because he had been out of the country twice — once on a research leave and once for a sabbatical year. He was told he could only be out of Canada for a maximum of 400 days out of four years. So he waited and counted.
When he finally applied for citizenship, he thought it would be a simple matter. But the process became difficult and lengthy when he was asked to fill out a residency questionnaire that required him to produce documents showing home and family ties, employment and contributions to Canadian society. It took him two weeks to fill out the form, as it involved reconstructing his absences and getting letters from his employers.
He was never told why he was required to fill out the questionnaire, which is not demanded of all applicants. And even now that he is a citizen, he wonders why he was “put through the different procedure.”
He thinks he may do an access-to-information search to learn just what in his history might have raised doubts and led immigration bureaucrats to red-flag his application, so that he was required to complete the laborious extra step.
Source:: Metro News
