I am writing you this letter to report a funny incidence that is happening to me. It is greatly affecting me and my family members, while making us wonder if anything could be done to improve the efficiency of the Canadian government -- particularly, Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC).

My name is Da Chen and my Permanent Residence number is RF03054255279. After finishing two Master’s degree and 7 years of successful career in science and engineering in US, I immigrated to Canada in the year 2000, along with my wife and daughter. I started full-time employment the 2nd day after relocating to British Columbia and have been a law-biding productive member of the community ever since (Vancouver, Richmond and Burnaby, BC).

When I applied for my citizenship after living in Canada for 3 years, the first shock came when I was required to take an extra background check, being told that my name might be a duplicate of other individuals who had criminal records. I have heard that such things are very common among Chinese with short names. Well, my name is very common if translated into English, but it is very uncommon if read in Chinese. Since my Chinese name is also spelled out in my application documents, I wonder why it was never checked. But without complaints about such seemingly trivial technical problems, I went ahead and gave my fingerprint for another round of extra background check and waited for 5 months.

After 5 months, we were told to take the citizenship test. My wife and I both successfully passed the test, but the second wave of shock came to us.

Because of the extra time it took to do the background check for me, the background check for my wife had expired. Therefore after our successful citizenship tests and background checks, my wife would need to go through another round of background check.

The vicious circle continues. Now my background check will expire in the next month. That means even if the results of my wife’s background check turns out to be "no criminal records" again, which I am sure will be the case, I will be required to go through another round of background check again. If the trend continues, my wife’s background check will expire before the results of my next background checks come back next time. We might never get our Canadian citizenship if we just sit here and do nothing.

My wife and I have called the telephone service of Citizenship Canada 5 times since summer of last year. Every time we get a polite officer talking to us, but also politely telling us that there would be absolutely nothing they could do about our applications. They also advised us, that there was absolutely positively no place we could report such inefficiency, and definitely, no improvements could be made over such a process. If this is a private corporation, can you imagine hiring a number of employees just telling people nothing could be done, as their daily job duties?

Since I am not a lazy bone myself and do not believe in idling without activities, I think it will be more productive to do something rather than watching the paint dry again. After all, it will be, at least, more fun to experiment what color of paint dries faster than others, rather than passively watching. I will start:

1) Send this letter to Minister of CIC & MPs of British Columbia and asking for their help and advice, then wait for a week. If nothing happens;
2) Send this letter to MPs of the entire parliament and asking for their help and advice, then wait for a week. If nothing happens;
3) Send this letter to MPs of the entire parliament and all the major media in Canada that I can think of, then wait for a week. If nothing happens;
4) Send this letter to all the above and also to known foreign medias and then wait for a week and more. At this point, it is purely watching and amusing...

If still nothing happens, I will have to watch the paint dry. But I still can not find any criminal records that disqualify me as a Canadian citizen. If you care to watch the paint dry along with me, this is week 1.

Thanks for your time & attention and hope you have a wonderful & miraculous day!