That's sad if this is the case because processing applications should have no impact in federal elections, particularly if all they are doing is taking it to the LPP stage. They could also schedule oaths AFTER the election date for all cases processed in March and April so as to avoid any accusations. There are options besides completely halting the processing which seems to be the case. I don't know, it doesn't make sense to me. Regardless of who is in power, Canada needs immigrants and citizens to survive the baby boomers retiring and dying off. It's not like immigration will be halted all of a sudden. And any changes to make citizenship harder to obtain would not be retroactive. Plus they are just exasperating the backlog by growing it even more.
Keep in mind it is speculation on my part.
Scheduling oaths after the election date? Then they could be accused of
delaying citizenship and votes - presumably for some subset of voters (with uneven geographic distribution hence voting impact). No, to do it, they would have to do so in some way that creates a gap - files that were not so far along that they'd be
likely to get citizenship (without unusual effort or just plain luck) paused so there doesn't appear to be any unseemly rush.
And as for 'halting' - if my guess or something like it is/was correct, it would effectively be only a pause, not a very long one at that, and within the periods they suggested as processing times. If the dates suggested above, and if it held straight to election day (which it wouldn't need to), it would only be slightly over a month.
Note, they're still doing oath ceremonies - so if (again hypothetically - speculation!) they unleash the approvals after the election, there'd likely be movement fast to scheduling / filling up the slots for ceremonies afterwards (for those upcoming ceremonies they have't filled,
if there has been a pause).
Don't get me wrong though - I'm not saying I
like this, or that someone thought it necessary at all. But it is an actual fact that due to the relative
stances of the parties, how many new Canadians vote and where is not a politically neutral question - alas. (I know which party I'd tend to blame for that, one where I frequently encounter claims about the other parties 'stuffing the ballot box' with immigrants - usually not as an outright official position, but just beneath the polite official surface, accusations of conspiracies).
I'd have preferred if the parties could get together and state publicly that they want as many Canadians to vote as possible, including new Canadians, and they'd like to see IRCC burn the candle wax to get those files done and wouldn't dare complain.
But that is not - alas - the world we live in at present. Given that - the civil service has a responsibility to ensure that it isn't seen to have its fingers on the scale, and if they thought it necessary, does not seem a crazy step to me.
Again though - speculation.