> “We feel like we are held hostage by the government,”

That exactly sums it up. Fortunately we had options, for many people in the same process that is not the case.

I had the same experience in the EU (Austria). After 8 years I was happy to leave and finally be able to stop worrying about visa issues.

It really does seem like immigration police's work is to make sure as few people as possible immigrate.

This is rather misleading. The average processing time for Canadian citizenship remains 21 months. There is a residency requirement that applicants live 1,095 days (a full three years) in Canada before applying.

Some require a residency follow-up, because there are people who cheat the residency requirement, forging paperwork to pretend to have lived in Canada, etc. This is only a minority of cases. There's an average of 172,000 new citizens to Canada each year, which is huge.