My suggestion would be that any day that you can count towards the residency retention requirements for permanent residency, you should be able to count towards citizenship.
We have seen the situations of our clients whose whole family lives here while the clients are working abroad for a Canadian company that creates Canadian jobs and makes Canadian sales to people abroad, which repatriates the money here, and they're not eligible for citizenship because they have to be abroad as part of their work. Those people, arguably, may be contributing more to Canada than some people who are in Canada or some people who were born in this country. I believe that those individuals should be able to count those days towards Canadian citizenship.