Faster, pussycat

Faster is, by nature, a relative term. We thought that this concurrent processing of Mr. O's new temporary work permit would be "faster" than his first one: he sent in his permit application the same day that his new potential employer sent in the LMO application. According to the agent at the CIC call centre, once the employer gets the LMO confirmation, all Mr. O has to do is call the call centre and they'll inform Vegreville, and the permit will be issued.

Catch being, we're still waiting for the LMO. Last time it took about 2 weeks, and this time it's already been a month. Last time it was the permit that took its sweet time, and this time it could potentially be very fast. Moral of the story: there is no shortcut.

Pieni maailma

For those of you who don't speak the world's tiniest language, that's "small world." Although, maybe you should start learning. The number of Finns or people with Finnish connections that I've come across in Toronto has been astounding. A short list:

-My dear friend C, who has Finnish heritage, and whose grandfather is in the process of getting his Finnish citizenship
-A colleague at work, who comes from Thunder Bay, aka Finnish-Canadian central, and has a funny story about how she pronounces her last name
-A lady at the bank, who actually lived in Sweden, but who can still count to five in Finnish
-Our friend T, who isn't Finnish at all but has been there - that's where we met him - and calls himself a Suomi fan
-My GP, who is Romanian but spent two years in Tampere, where Mr. O grew up, and can bust off a little suomea
-A girl in my yoga class who has a Finnish-Canadian husband who doesn't speak at all but who just got his EU passport
-A couple at the Art Bar who I pegged as Finns immediately
-Countless faceless but instantly recognizable names on hockey jerseys, TV show credits, message boards

I'm forgetting some, but these are the main ones. I think that's one of the great things about Toronto, you're always among people you know.

Even the CBC is getting in on the act with Finnish lessons. So now you have no excuse.

Get an education, eh

This op-ed in today's Globe is overall a well-meaning gesture, but why, oh why, do Canadians always compare themselves to the U.S. instead of to farther afield? Americans aren't exactly the pinnacle of innovation and academe, y'know? I'm beginning to suspect that the real "barriers" are the ideological walls built around North America...what a short-sighted waste.

Canada's relative under-production of graduate degrees, especially compared to the United States, is widely identified as a barrier to increasing our country's international competitiveness and productivity. For example, in 2004, American universities awarded twice as many master's degrees per capita as Canadian universities and about 35 per cent more doctoral degrees per capita than their Canadian counterparts. The OECD reports that Canada trails far behind the leading nations in terms of doctoral graduates.

This might have something to do with the cost of education in this country more than doubling in the time it takes the average grad student to put in six years plus a thesis...just a guess...did I mention I got my master's FOR FREE in Scandinavia?

And of course there is the obligatory nod to immigrants, particularly those elusive, highly educated ones:

Immigration will also play a critical role. Streamlining our immigration process to make Canada a more attractive option for skilled immigrants will be important. However, Canada cannot count on maintaining current levels of immigration of advanced degree-holders to meet future labour market needs. In an increasingly knowledge-based world, competition for highly-educated immigrants is growing in developed nations and emerging economies alike.

Consequently, more needs to be done to attract the best and the brightest international graduate students who remain critical to fuelling the country's pipeline of highly qualified personnel.

I agree wholeheartedly that the immigration process has to be streamlined. But then what? We've got a critical shortage of family doctors in this country while meanwhile there are surgeons driving taxis, not to mention, ahem, web marketing designers stuck in demeaning ghettoized translation jobs. I'm sure they're all writing home about how great Canada is. Why bother attracting more when we aren't making the most of the people we have here, enabling them to do what they came here to do? I'll say it again: what a waste.

Auto-reply

This is interesting mainly for the list of topics to which the minister will not respond:

This will acknowledge receipt of your e-mail to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration.

If this is a request for case information, the responsibility placed on us by the Privacy Act to protect all personal information precludes us from responding using e-mail unless we are able to verify that you are entitled/authorized to receive the case specific information. In this respect, if you are the applicant or a dependant listed on the application and you provide us with your full name, date of birth, and a file number or Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) client ID, or you are a person to whom we are authorized to release information (written consent on the citizenship or immigration file) and are able to provide the applicant's full name, DOB and the file number or CIC client ID, you will receive a reply by e-mail within 10 - 30 working days. If you are not the applicant or listed dependant or you are not authorized to receive the information, you will not receive a further reply to your e-mail.

*Please note that we will not respond to e-mails concerning the following:

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Letter to Diane

Dear Ms. Finley,

I am a Canadian citizen, a journalist and editor, who has returned to Canada after almost 6 years abroad in Finland. While I was there I married a Finnish man and last August we moved back to Canada. He came on a temporary work permit (doing translation work for a local agency) and I am employed as an editor at a magazine. We sent in our application for permanent residency under the family class in October, and we hope to have the AIP in May. We are a talented, educated couple who hope to start a family soon.

In the meantime my husband, who is an Internet marketing designer who made $70,000/year in Finland, has been living off a $1,500/month salary and our savings, waiting for his AIP. I am supporting him in every way I can, but the bottom line is he feels frustrated and humiliated everyday, being forced to accept this drop in his quality of life that moving back to my country has entailed. He was denied a drivers' licence in Ontario even though Canada and Finland have a reciprocal agreement on this documentation that Canadian provinces have never honoured. He cannot see where all this investment is taking him, except back to where he was before he left Finland.

He has also been applying for jobs in his field, and last November he was offered a job at an advertising agency, for only slightly less than he was making in Finland. The need to reapply for a temporary work permit has caused a delay of three months (first in the delay of the agency in applying for the LMO, a process they don't seem to be familiar with, and now in the actual application process).

If, as the legitimate spouse of a Canadian citizen, he was granted an open work permit upon arrival in Canada (something he could potentially apply for before entering), then he would be free to make his own way here and his entry into society as a productive member would be expedited. As it stands, being denied this freedom is tantamount to a message from the Canadian government that he is not welcome here, and he would be better off back in Finland, where I am granted work and residence permits, licenses, and other basic rights simply by virtue of being married to a citizen.

He feels that, should his new temporary work permit be denied, he will have little choice but to return to Finland. This puts me in the horrible position of choosing between my marriage and my family and career here in Canada. I never thought that moving to Canada would have the potential to pull my world apart. This is not the way it should be.

Now, I know that Canada is in need of young people exactly like my husband: educated, hard-working, honest. His job description is on the National Occupations List and the list for Ontario, so he is not taking jobs from those who came here before him, but filling a need. I also know that the spouses of temporary workers in Canada are granted an open work permit for the time that they spend here. Why are Canadians' spouses denied the same ability to make their own way?

This simple change would increase the quality of life considerably for new immigrants, and increase Canada's appeal for immigrants who have professional careers already begun elsewhere. It would also work to stop the senseless punishment that most first-generation immigrants suffer here in Canada, for little or no real reward. They put in far, far more than they receive back from this place. Having lived in Scandinavia I can assure you that they would get better deals elsewhere. Canada needs to step up and show these people that they are a valuable part of society, and that begins with the immigration process.

We cannot even consider purchasing a home or starting a family until we have a more stable foundation here. All we ask is to be able to take the jobs we find, work, and live like everyone else. When that is denied to us, the appeal of abandoning this place and going elsewhere becomes stronger and stronger the longer we wait.

Please explain why Canadians' spouses are not granted and cannot be granted open work permits while waiting for permanent residency, and what you are doing to speed the PR application process.

Sincerely,

Fellow ingrate!

Chinese-Australian poet Ouyang Yu has a poem called The Ungrateful Immigrant. Not only do we both have excellent titular taste, but we both like to use the word "fucking" as an adjective in poems. w00t!

Boxing week special: five days off!!

It's been 2 weeks since Mr O.'s temporary work visa app landed in Vegreville - and two weeks since my last post. No real news to report, obviously, but I did notice that the processing time for tempies (one of the benefits of spending so much time with a vocabulary is that you get to give everything cute little names) has been reduced by five days for those who got them in by Dec 30. Again, not relevant to us, exactly, but a step in the right direction all the same.

Keeping tabs

Mr. O's temporary work app arrived in Vegreville, AB - home of the world's largest Ukrainian Easter Egg - yesterday. The current estimated wait time on the CIC site for apps received on or before Dec 11 is 44 days, so really that means we don't know how long ours might take. (If you're in a betting mood, leave a comment.)

Speaking of wait times, I talked to a CIC agent this morning about the wait times on the PR application. Mr. O had emailed me earlier, mildly freaking about the prospect of having to wait another 12 months for his visa - thanks to a note we'd failed to, er, notice on the processing times page, which reads:

There is a two-step process involved in family class applications: the assessment of the sponsorship application in Canada and the assessment of the permanent residence application outside Canada by the visa office. There are separate processing times for each of these two steps.

Processing an out-of-country sponsorship application (i.e. the first step) takes 37 days at CPC Mississauga. In-country, the same app takes five to six months. When that application goes through, Mr. O will get a letter stating his AIP, which means he can apply for an open work permit. But then step 2 begins, and the current wait times on that are anywhere from three to nine months. "I like to tell people 18 months start to finish," says the nice CIC guy.

When I asked him why it took so much longer to process a sponsorship app in Canada than from outside, he told me that the RCMP and CSIS checks (two of the three checks done on each file, Immigration being the third) are both backlogged at the moment because Canadian employers have also started conducting private checks through the RCMP. He also said that the medical is entered into the system about three months after it's done, and that this time of year is also the peak period for applications, all of which create delays.

It makes me think it would be so much easier if CIC agents could do their own checks, rather than relying on the RCMP (in which, sorry, I have little confidence in general) and CSIS. Then again, this could all be part of a big political passing of the buck. We really have no way of knowing.

The good news is that this doesn't change our situation in any practical way. Once he has the AIP he can work (or not work) as he likes, and that date hasn't moved any. The rest of it is, at this point, too far into the future to be worth worrying about at this point.