Permanent Residency: The Final Stage?

Nearly four months have passed since the trauma of undergoing my immigration medical for my Permanent Residency application, and it seems that the end is now in sight! At the end of February I received an email from my new best friend, Citizenship & Immigration Canada (CiC), letting me know that ‘The processing of my application for permanent residence in Canada is almost complete.’ YEY!

After reading the email all the way through, I was so excited to see that only five relatively small tasks were standing between me and my illustrious Permanent Resident card:

• Family Composition – “Has your family composition changed since our last correspondence?” i.e. Am I still in a common-law relationship with the person listed in my application? This was an easy one to evaluate (yes I am!), and as this means that no action is required, 1.5 seconds later I was ready to move onto the next step.

• Right of Permanent Residence Fee – “Every principal applicant and his/her accompanying spouse/common law partner are required to pay a Right of Permanent Residence Fee (RPRF) in the amount of 490 Canadian dollars. The RPRF is a separate fee that must be paid in addition to the processing fees that you have already paid.” Yes, this means paying ANOTHER $980 total (for two of us), though as this is the final fee it’s one I’m more than willing to pay! The payment was easy to make by credit card through the CiC website, and I emailed the proof of payment to them immediately.

• Passport Scan – “You are exempted from obtaining a visa to visit Canada under Regulation 190 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act; therefore you do not need to submit original passports to finalize your application.” Good news! Instead, we just had to print off a scanned copy of each of our passport photo pages, which we have  a stock of after so many visa applications.

• Height and Eye Colour – “We require confirmation of this information for yourself and each accompanying family member. Please complete the attached form  “Biodata” and return it to us.”  The email didn’t say what this was for, but I’m making an educated (and hopefully correct) guess that this information will be printed on our PR card, just like it is on BC Drivers Licenses. Completed in a little under two minutes.

• Photographs – “You must submit two (2) recent photographs of yourself and of each accompanying family member that meet the requirements stated on this webpage.” Again, I’m assuming this is for the PR card, and luckily we had many, many spares of passport photos for various visa related reasons. It took around 20 minutes to locate them all, but after searching the apartment we found them in the end!

My documents needed to be submitted by mail rather than email, as hard copy passport photographs were required. It didn’t take long to package this together and send it Express Mail to the “Case Processing Pilot – Ottawa (CPP-O)”. I had 60 days to collect the documents and mail them, but it took me just two weeks, and one of those was spent in Hawaii….but that’s another blog post. The total shipping cost for all the documents was $15 (postage has turned out to be a much larger chunk of the overall PR cost than I thought it would be).

So now we’re back to playing the waiting game, but hopefully for the final time! If all goes well in Ottawa we could have our Permanent Resident card in just a few months. Then the summer would really be worth celebrating. Stay tuned…

**********************************************************************************************************************************

Application Timeline

• Applied to Province for PNP Nomination – February 2012
• Received certificate of nomination from Province – April 2012
• Sent certificate of nomination and other PR papers to CIC – July 2012
• Had forms returned for missing a signature – August 2012
• Re-sent PR papers to CIC – September 2012
• Received request for a medical examination – November 2012
• Received request for passport photos and final information – February 2013
• Received official confirmation of Permanent Residence – April 2013