After more than 20 years, Sudbury woman becomes Canadian citizen
CBC
After living in Canada for more than 20 years, Neha Singh has finally become a citizen.
During a Zoom ceremony on Monday, she took the oath of citizenship alongside 57 other candidates across the country.
Singh first moved to Sudbury, Ont., from India in 2002 to attend Cambrian College as an international student. She made friends, graduated, got a job, started a business and even put down roots when she got married.
Singh admits that for a long time she had all the necessary documents gathered that were needed to apply for Canadian citizenship, but kept putting off the process due to her disdain for paperwork.
"A big part of the delay is — I'm absolutely terrible at paperwork."
Then last year she noticed Immigration, Refugee, Citizenship Canada had begun digitizing the citizenship applications.
"One day when I was Googling I found that you could do your Canadian citizenship online. It took me about two hours to submit my paperwork online," she said.
"A year later I'm a Canadian citizen. It's a miracle."
"It's a big deal for me personally. Really for me it's a case study in digital transformation because they've removed so many barriers by making this online," Singh said.
To help her celebrate, Singh invited a small group of family and friends to her home overlooking Ramsey Lake. Some friends bought her Canadian products like maple syrup, Tim Horton's and Smarties as gifts. She also had her mother, sister and niece on video call watching from India.
During the 45 minute ceremony Singh was asked to cut up her permanent residency card, then she took the oath of citizenship along with the others online and finally the ceremony included signing the national anthem, O Canada.
Singh was glad to conduct the process over Zoom otherwise there would have been a delay to wait for an in-person ceremony. And she suspects there were others online from smaller communities across Canada.
"I'm sure there's people from all over, all rural places that they're trying to process together."
"We had 58 new Canadians today."
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