Mr. O mailed his application for a new temporary work visa to Vegreville today, with the understanding that his employer has also sent their app for his LMO to HRSDC. Here's the official link to how this all works. If you clicked that link you'll notice that Mr. O isn't exactly following the rules, but rather taking the advice of a CIC agent. (In stark contrast to the CIC site, the phone reps are wonderfully human - helpful and practical.)
Depending on whether or not he'll have to wait for the LMO (which comes to the employer and then he has to send it to CIC himself) to start processing, it could take from three to six weeks.
Also of note: our PR application was submitted exactly three months ago today. Wheee!
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Go ahead, trust your boss
Mr. O and I went out to celebrate, oh, it must have been the Friday before last. The occasion: holding his new contract in his hot little hand. Note, I didn't say "signed" his contract, and I should also mention he had put out an ultimatum to his "agent" a few days previous, that if, after over a month of waiting, he didn't have a contract by the end of the week he wanted to move on to other options. (Stockholm still haunts him, too.)
So he got his contract, and we had our dinner, and little has happened since. Last week the HR contact sent him some half-filled forms (which, he pointed out, had a few too many spelling mistakes, kinda like his driver's license, but I digress). He sent them back completed, with a request to have the HR contact call him so they could speak directly. The person was supposed to be at the original contract meeting, but couldn't make it, so they have never actually met.
According to the forms, the company has at least one other person employed under a foreign work visa, so this process should be at least somewhat familiar to the person in charge. It doesn't seem that way, though. Aside from the painfully slow pace (if they had filed the forms when they offered him the position at the end of November, he would be working there now), Mr. O is starting to get a bit anxious as to whether he can trust the employer to fill out the forms correctly, that is, in such a way that the government will in fact approve the application, which is still not a given.
Before he went in to get his contract, Mr. O called a CIC agent who advised him to send the papers to Vegreville for in-country processing, despite the fact that, as his job is on the National Occupation List, he is eligible for concurrent processing - which is only available via foreign offices, i.e. CHC in London. The woman asked him to append a letter explaining this to his application, info he passed on to the new employer, but which hasn't been done.
All of this - plus the prospect of being left without a job should the app not go through - has Mr. O in a bit of a panic, and rightly so: How do you trust an inexperienced/overworked person you've never met with your future?
So he got his contract, and we had our dinner, and little has happened since. Last week the HR contact sent him some half-filled forms (which, he pointed out, had a few too many spelling mistakes, kinda like his driver's license, but I digress). He sent them back completed, with a request to have the HR contact call him so they could speak directly. The person was supposed to be at the original contract meeting, but couldn't make it, so they have never actually met.
According to the forms, the company has at least one other person employed under a foreign work visa, so this process should be at least somewhat familiar to the person in charge. It doesn't seem that way, though. Aside from the painfully slow pace (if they had filed the forms when they offered him the position at the end of November, he would be working there now), Mr. O is starting to get a bit anxious as to whether he can trust the employer to fill out the forms correctly, that is, in such a way that the government will in fact approve the application, which is still not a given.
Before he went in to get his contract, Mr. O called a CIC agent who advised him to send the papers to Vegreville for in-country processing, despite the fact that, as his job is on the National Occupation List, he is eligible for concurrent processing - which is only available via foreign offices, i.e. CHC in London. The woman asked him to append a letter explaining this to his application, info he passed on to the new employer, but which hasn't been done.
All of this - plus the prospect of being left without a job should the app not go through - has Mr. O in a bit of a panic, and rightly so: How do you trust an inexperienced/overworked person you've never met with your future?
Monday, January 7, 2008
5.9 mil and counting
The chart above is from the Economist's special report on immigration. Canada ranks third in both percentage of immigrants and total number in millions, just beating out Britain by 100,000 people. Incidentally, 5.9 million is more than the entire population of Finland.
The CIC also anticipates admitting an average 250,000 new immigrants a year over the next few years, which might drive Canada up in the ratings.
Class action
While Mr. O and I were touring our nation's capital on Saturday, the Globe and Mail was reporting on a class action suit filed by a B.C. man against the Immigration Department, which accuses the government of overcharging on immigration sponsorship fees by 50% (thanks to C&C for the tip!).
Alan Hinton and his lawyer Richard Kurland spent 13 years trying to access information that proved the cost of processing a $75 spousal sponsorship application was in fact only $36.69. So far the suit only covers cases filed between 1994 and 2004, but Kurland has asked for an extension to include all cases up to the end of 2007, which would mean us.
This is my favourite part of the article by far:
Alan Hinton and his lawyer Richard Kurland spent 13 years trying to access information that proved the cost of processing a $75 spousal sponsorship application was in fact only $36.69. So far the suit only covers cases filed between 1994 and 2004, but Kurland has asked for an extension to include all cases up to the end of 2007, which would mean us.
This is my favourite part of the article by far:
"...the Immigration Department, he said, could never ask for such an exemption "because politically it is suicide to tell immigrants that the government is profiting on their visas at a time that they are claiming that processing times are too long because they don't have resources for more visa offices."Tee-hee.
Thursday, January 3, 2008
Starting new
By the end of 2007 I was pretty eager for it to be over. I had this romantic idea in my head of the New Year, in which we would already have a place to live, jobs of some reasonably profitable sort and papers in progress. In other words we would wake up and be ahead of the game. This was only reinforced by one of those "If you have a place to sleep and some money in the bank and can read you are better off than 99% of the world's population" cheery type holiday Powerpoint card thingys, which proved once and for all that all my whining is that of a rich, impatient white girl peeking through toilet-paper rolls for perspective. And the fact remains that we ARE doing absolutely fine, and will be doing even better if Mr. O's mythical job offer ever comes through, and if we find a flat that doesn't leak heat all day and suffocate us all night.
Mr. O's argument is simple: we're not going to be within driving distance of my family whether we're in Toronto or Helsinki, so we might as well go where there's universal daycare and six-weeks' vacation. And he's right. Six months late in getting that message through to me, but right all the same. The frustration and fear that this move was a bad one, a mistake, and an expensive one at that, is still lingering under the surface of everything.
And yet, despite all the practical reasons why we should have stayed in Finland, being home with my family over the holidays, getting to know my five-year-old-when-I-left-16-year-old-now brother, thinking of my sister having kids, and my parents getting older, gets me in a root-laying-down mood. Canada's not so bad, eh? People manage to raise kids here just fine. I can fly home to see the fam for the weekend if I need to. I've got 10 times the job options here, plus writing courses, yoga classes, hairdressers, and doctors, all in English (Woo-hoo!). Toronto is a hard place to love, but once you get it - kinda like learning Finnish, hmm - it's intensely satisfying.
And so while nothing in our situation has actually changed since my last post, the change of the year has cleared away all the logistics and To-Do lists and left me with the bare cold shock (and yes, embarrassing as it may be, it is a shock) of the suddenly permanent distances in my life. The start of 2008 has put me in a state of cold shock that This Is How My Life Is Going To Be from now on. Because when it comes right down to it, Mr. O isn't staying here. Not forever. No way. And if I go, there are many things I will lose. Not to understate the things he will lose by staying here, but this is my blog and I'm being selfish so today it's all about me.
So I have a choice to make which is so much bigger than which neighbourhood to live in, whether I want to stay in journalism or not, whether we should rent or buy. I have to pick a continent, and a lifestyle. Fuck fuck fuck.
Mr. O's argument is simple: we're not going to be within driving distance of my family whether we're in Toronto or Helsinki, so we might as well go where there's universal daycare and six-weeks' vacation. And he's right. Six months late in getting that message through to me, but right all the same. The frustration and fear that this move was a bad one, a mistake, and an expensive one at that, is still lingering under the surface of everything.
And yet, despite all the practical reasons why we should have stayed in Finland, being home with my family over the holidays, getting to know my five-year-old-when-I-left-16-year-old-now brother, thinking of my sister having kids, and my parents getting older, gets me in a root-laying-down mood. Canada's not so bad, eh? People manage to raise kids here just fine. I can fly home to see the fam for the weekend if I need to. I've got 10 times the job options here, plus writing courses, yoga classes, hairdressers, and doctors, all in English (Woo-hoo!). Toronto is a hard place to love, but once you get it - kinda like learning Finnish, hmm - it's intensely satisfying.
And so while nothing in our situation has actually changed since my last post, the change of the year has cleared away all the logistics and To-Do lists and left me with the bare cold shock (and yes, embarrassing as it may be, it is a shock) of the suddenly permanent distances in my life. The start of 2008 has put me in a state of cold shock that This Is How My Life Is Going To Be from now on. Because when it comes right down to it, Mr. O isn't staying here. Not forever. No way. And if I go, there are many things I will lose. Not to understate the things he will lose by staying here, but this is my blog and I'm being selfish so today it's all about me.
So I have a choice to make which is so much bigger than which neighbourhood to live in, whether I want to stay in journalism or not, whether we should rent or buy. I have to pick a continent, and a lifestyle. Fuck fuck fuck.
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