The percentage of immigrants with Canadian citizenship dropped between 2011 and 2016, the result of what an expert calls “Harper-era citizenship policy changes.”

According to a new analysis, Canada’s overall naturalization rate fell to 82.7 per cent from 85.6 per cent in that period, during which the former Conservative government, under then prime minister Stephen Harper, raised the residency, language and knowledge requirements, as well as the citizenship application fee.

“There were a lot of changes made under the government and the impacts of those changes are reflected in the latest census data,” said Andrew Griffith, who will present his analysis at a national immigration conference in Calgary on Thursday.

“Although the changes only came in 2010, immigrants who landed four or five years earlier were still subject to those changes. The changes were not just going forward, but they applied to people who had already submitted their applications.”

Based on the latest census data, Griffith, a retired director general of the Immigration Department’s citizenship and multiculturalism branch, examined citizenship rates by region of birth, province, education, age, income, gender and immigration class before and after the Harper government’s citizenship reforms.

Over 90 per cent of immigrants who came to Canada before 1981 were Canadian citizens in 2016, about the same rate for those who arrived in the two decades after them.

At the time of the 2011 national survey, 77.2 per cent of immigrants who had been in the country between five and 10 years had citizenship. By the time of the 2016 census, after the Tory reforms had been in place for several years, the rate fell to 68.5 per cent.

Under the Conservative government, citizenship applicants had to be physically present in Canada for four out of six years (instead of three out of five) with a minimum of 183 days in each of the four years, before applying. The Tories also introduced a more stringent citizenship exam, raised the passing score of the citizenship test to 75 per cent from 60 per cent, and required proof of proficiency in English or French.

Griffith found raising the bar for citizenship had a bigger impact on immigrants with lower education levels.

While historically immigrants with university degrees have had a higher citizenship rate than their counterparts with secondary education or less, their gaps have become more pronounced in the aftermath of the new exam and language requirement, said Griffith.

Among the immigrant cohort who arrived between 2006 and 2010, only 59 per cent of those who had not completed secondary education became citizens by 2016, compared to 74 per cent of their peers with university degrees. The gap of 15 percentage points surpassed the 9-point gap for the immigrant cohort in the previous decade.

In terms of age groups, the 2016 census showed that those 55 and older who immigrated in recent years from Asia, Africa and Latin America all had much lower naturalization rates than those in the same age group who arrived in earlier waves from Europe.

Griffith suggested the gap is related to the Tory government raising the age of the language requirement exemption from 55 to 64 years old, causing some older immigrants to delay their citizenship applications in order to bypass the language requirement.

The impact of the language requirement was also observed in the naturalization rate for parents and grandparents sponsored by their children in Canada — a group that was most likely to be affected by the age change to the language exemption, he added.

More than 90 per cent of sponsored immigrant parents and grandparents who arrived before 1995 were citizens by 2016. However, the rate dropped to 81 per cent for the 1996-2005 cohort and just 54 per cent who had been in Canada for less than 10 years.

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Among those who came to Canada under different immigration streams, refugees have continued to have the highest citizenship rate, hovering at 90 per cent, which Griffith said is due to necessity since many would otherwise be stateless.

However, that also started to erode in the last decade, with less than 70 per cent of refugees who arrived between 2006 and 2016 being granted citizenship. Griffith said refugees’ naturalization rate is most susceptible to changes to the citizenship application fee, which was hiked to $530 from $100 by the Conservative government.

Although the Liberals have reversed some of their predecessor’s citizenship policies last year, Griffith said the unchanged citizenship fee remains “a major deterrent to naturalization.”