Thank you for the question.
The department is constantly striving to improve processing times and to improve client service and accessibility, as I mentioned. Historically, the wait time for a ceremony, once the applicants had completed all the other requirements, was in the range of three to five months.
This is a proposal where the applicant does not elect to complete their oath at a ceremony as they do now, as I mentioned, but elects instead to complete their oath online. Once that oath is completed online, they become a citizen. They no longer have to wait the three to five months to attend the ceremony, but they still have the benefit of being able to participate in that ceremony at the later date.
In a sense, you can describe that as win-win, in that there is greater accessibility and flexibility. The applicant has an option to become a citizen at a earlier point in time, but still enjoy all of the benefits of participating in a ceremony, in terms of all of the important elements of that for inclusion, community participation and those kinds of considerations.