$5.25 a finger

Mr. O is going to get his fingerprints, um, taken (?) at the Toronto Police Service today. He called and they told him "they've given these services to private companies" in the past. He needs two pieces of ID and $52.50. Then he can ship these off to Abu Dhabi where they can compare them with the prints they took when he got his work permit there. (It could be worse, I suppose: the Emirati government took an iris scan, too.)

Time off for good conduct

Mr. O sent in his application for an open work permit before we left for holidays at the end of May. Current processing time is 40 days, so we're not expecting to hear anything before July. It's unclear if we need to reapply for a temporary residence permit despite the AIP, so we'll have to call CIC to check on that. It's just that it's summer and so easy to get lazy...

To proceed with the actual permanent residence card, Mr. O needs to get a Certificate of Good Conduct and police check from the Abu Dhabi government, as he lived there for more than six months in the past 10 years. As part of the process, he has to be fingerprinted by the police here, which is, as he says, "kinda creepy."

That's nothing compared to the Brazil-esque (again, the movie, not the country) process of obtaining forms in Abu Dhabi. I remember when Mr. O went in to get his UAE driver's licence; we had our own personal Arabic-speaking fix-it guy and it still took us several trips. From the above link:

We suggest that you send the documents to a friend and your friend can obtain the certificate from the Police Department on your behalf so the processing time will be faster than sending it directly by courier to the Police Department.

Since we have few "friends" left down there (the Finnish satellite office Mr. O worked at is now closed), we aren't sure how long this will take.

P.s. The trip over the border and back again was uneventful. We got lucky with our officers, I guess, as they were all very friendly while others had more of a time of it. Hooray for being white.