It's who you know

We spent two months wondering what would come of our begging letter to CIC to waive the requirement for the Emirati police certificate. It wasn't so unreasonable: Mr. O had lived in the country for exactly one month longer than the six-month exemption, and had a total of two speeding tickets (goes with the territory over there, mom) on his record. We had tried to deliver it according to the instructions provided, and failed. It was worth a try.

Of course, they didn't go for it. I wasn't surprised by that. What surprised me was the near-illiteracy of the response we received. First, the letter was a cut and paste from the CIC site, and the crucial sentence, the sentence that informed us that our request was denied, was actually missing the word "denied." Lucky we both have good grasp of English (something so easily taken for granted, but that should never be when dealing with immigrants), we managed to intuit that much.

What made me really angry though was that the author of the letter (identified only by a code number) didn't seem to have a great grasp of English him- or herself. In "clarifying" the instructions for us once more, they had attached a print out of a page from the CIC site, which instructs the applicant to get the fingerprints, etc. legalized at the Emirati embassy in Ottawa - highlighting this part and actually telling us to send the application package there instead. This is just wrong, wrong, wrong. Anyone who had any comprehension of subordinate clauses (and working for the government you'd think that would be prerequisite number 3 or 4 at least) would see that the documents which were notarized by the Embassy were then to be shipped off to the UAE. Either out of sloppiness or sheer illiteracy, our "helpful" CIC fuckwit was sending us down a path to ruin, or at least to failure to get the documents in before Mr. O has to apply for another open work permit in June.

I wasn't having it. It was obvious that we weren't going to be successful by Canadian methods - it was going to require some special effort. The UAE site had a suggestion: to find a "friend" who lived there who could deliver the papers for us. "Friend" means a) male b) Arabic-speaking and c) possessed of half a brain and a little resilience. Unfortunately, Mr. O's former employer no longer had an office down there, and we had no way of reaching their former fixer. I started looking online for a lawyer in the UAE who could act on our behalf, or at least recommend someone who could, but Mr. O balked at the potential fees (he is, at this point, entirely fed up with the cost of this whole endeavour), and the need for early morning phone calls was too much for us.

I sent out messages to the two or three people I knew with connections there, and put out an APB on Facebook. Within a week I had heard back from a Finnish couple who also worked for the same company, a Danish friend of mine now living back in Copenhagen, and a friend of a friend who was working down there at the time. This last one, we'll call her Laura, has a few friends who might fit the bill, so we wrote her up a big letter last weekend and sent everything down there to her on Monday. If that doesn't work out we'll try the alternatives, because we have options now. After feeling a bit amputated it's very good to have friends come to your aid. We knew from the very start that this part wasn't going to be easy.

We also heard from a few unexpected sources, like a friend we've only known here, who, it turns out, lived in the UAE as a child, and still has family in the country. Even after a year and a half of Finns coming out of the woodwork, it still surprises me when I make connections to these tiny places. A constant reminder that we are not on our own.

Our man in academe

A friend put me on to Jeffrey Reitz today, who's a prof in ethnic, immigration and pluralism studies at the University of Toronto. The rumour is he conducted a study into the CIC processing centre in Vegreville, AB, and found rampant racial discrimination and probably the bones of small animals and god knows what else. I am hunting for it and shall post it here when found.

Touchdown

So they tried to deliver the effing package one more time, and one more time it was rejected, apparently by security guards who rejected the package on the grounds that it had to be addressed to a particular person, who shall remain a mystery, at least for the time being. I'm thinking back to Karri's phone call with someone at the Abu Dhabi police station there, who couldn't give us a name "because there were several people" it could go to and am wondering if we were lax in our investigations or if there really is some kind of broken link somewhere. I'm assuming that other people have successfully gotten their documentation through, and then back, so probably a bit of both.

At any rate, the FedEx tracking status sprung back into motion and we could follow the stupid thing across Sharjah and so on right up to our door today, and it's waiting for us at the FedEx depot, hopefully with some flowers and a big I'm sorry.

So Mr. O is now writing a letter to the CIC explaining the entire debacle and including photocopies of the documents, and hoping they can come to some kind of solution, on a case by case basis, as they say. My fear is that this is going to set back the entire process even more than it has been already, and June isn't really that far away, in immigration years (kind of like cat years, or is it dog years?). At this point the whole thing has become a kind of irritation in what is otherwise a very normal life, so in a way I feel cheated, as if we've kept our end of the bargain by being good consumer citizens and getting jobs and paying taxes and doing all of that shit, and these formalities are just here to make us older before our time.

And the same goes on the CIC's end: with all the issues of immigrant integration and wasted skills and poverty and systemic racism within the system (more on that later), I'm highly doubtful that they are going to do more but ask that we send it all again, and we'll be stuck in the kind of feedback loop that I have to assume accounts for all the 46-month long unresolved cases on Trackitt. Freaky.

Breaking point

Today we woke up on a mission. I called FedEx and had a heart-to-heart with the random call centre guy, who gave us the same "update" from Dec 14, and promised to have somebody call us back about it asap. I told him if somebody actually called me back, I would fall off my chair. Then when I got to work I wrote a strongly worded letter and faxed it to FedEx HQ in Mississauga. Mr. O, meanwhile, was on the phone with the CIC, trying to ascertain just how we would go about completing his immigration process sans Emirati Certificate of Good Conduct.

Lo and behold, somebody from FedEx called him back this afternoon, somebody with a name AND a private extension. They told him they would call Abu Dhabi to establish the whereabouts of the package (which Mr. O has all but accepted as lost by this point) and either attempt to redeliver it or send it back to us. Mr. O also asked for a letter explaining the reasons it couldn't be delivered, if that turned out to be the case, and/or the reasons for its disappearance, for the sake of a consolation prize for the CIC.

This miniature shitstorm, after months of laissez-faire neglect of my blog and our little experiment, has started me thinking about breaking points. We are all trained to have faith in these little institutions (like mail) and when they break down, I for one am incredulous, until it becomes clear that if I don't do something about it, nobody will. This no doubt makes me spoiled, as spoiled as anybody used to paying money to have things done for me by others. It's a shock when this doesn't happen, or when the system breaks down. And yet, when it does, really there's nothing in place here to help us out. No consumer advocate, no 6 'o clock ass-kicking camera-toting watchdog. Nobody really gives a damn.

FedEx nightmare

We are caught in a FedEx purgatory: the documents haven't been delivered, and yet they haven't been returned. The minimum-wage morons at the FedEx 1-800 number (oh yes, morons is kind) are alternately outrageously unhelpful and outright rude and defensive. It's been over a month now, and we've gotten exactly zero answers for our trouble. I am ready to kick some serious courier ass.

Of course, if they're lost, there's nothing we can do. It would be a huge relief at this point just to get them back. And considering the $150 we paid for the delivery, we've got jack squat from the courier company. (One relatively nice but equally useless moron told us the package was sitting at the AD end, waiting for an account number to be charged to ship them back. Um, another $150? I smell a scam.) Problem is, according to the CIC website, the papers must be delivered by courier, and nobody else is returning our phone calls. Welcome to the black hole. Knowing Abu Dhabi bureaucracy, I doubt that anybody knows what the hell is going on.

Which is fine, sure, I have no use for those documents anyway. It's not like we forked over a couple hundred bucks and spent several months collecting them. It's not like they're crucial to Mr. O's immigration or anything. We'll just call up the CIC and explain, and they'll just waive the whole police thing (really it was just a test of our commitment, to show we really care).

Express my ass

Mr. O is having great fun trying to obtain his certificate of good conduct from the U.A.E. police. Here's a taste: The only system of addresses in Abu Dhabi for mail is a P.O. box system. When you live there you get in a taxi and say "Hyundai Showroom," not "123 Main Street." Street addresses are a relative science, and that's just the way it is. Hence the P.O boxes.

However, FedEx express courier ($150 worth, neveryoumind) requires a signature to deliver a package, so dropping it in the P.O. Box isn't apparently an option. They called Mr. O on Saturday after trying to deliver it three times (Thursday, Friday, Saturday), asking if there was any other number they could try. Of course, Thursday afternoon and Friday are known as The Weekend in that part of the world, and it would appear that there's some kind of larger holiday going on, which would explain the inability to get through. Why they don't just get the janitor to sign it and drop it in the PO box is beyond me.

The bitch of it is, this is the last piece we need for his PR application to be complete, and it's already taken six months, including our own procrastination. Once we got the OWP we were, as far as daily life goes, home free, but now I'd really just like to get the damn thing over with and get on with my life. We have no idea how long the processing will take on their end, but if delivery itself is this complicated...well, inshallah the rest of it is less of a gong show.

Dog days

We've gotten pretty complacent these last few months, since Mr. O's open work permit came in. It is summer after all, and at this point any official accreditation he gets feels like just more paperwork and rubber stamping - our quality of life won't change much from here to there - which only serves to underline my basic argument that spouses of citizens should be granted open work permits from the outset, and the system would run a lot smoother for everyone. This blog probably wouldn't exist.

So in true summer fashion I'm not only lazy with posting but also with following what's been going on in the latest round in our little immigration game: Mr. O got his legalized fingerprint form back from the U.A.E. embassy in Ottawa last week, and so he'll now have to send that and a copy of his old residence permit and passport to the Ministry of Interior in Dubai. There are also some fees which he needs to "contact them" about - and the site is also a bit vague on the timelines, as they recommend getting "a friend" in Dubai to help you out with the forms to speed up the process. When we lived there Mr. O's Finnish employer had a local Arabic-speaking fixer to take care of such things, but we have no such connection now.

Of course, with all our easy summer dawdling, the permanent residency process is delayed even further - nothing will move until he gets his certificate of good conduct back from the Emirati government and into the hands of the CIC.

He also has to renew his OHIP card, which he tried to do the other day but there must have been some kind of big deadline because the line at Service Canada was out the door, so he'll have to go back. Wouldn't it be nice if the government's many heads could talk to each other, and they could confirm that his permit had been extended (say, in a database somewhere) and just mail him a new card? Because lines suck, especially in August.

Tra la la la, off to the cottage...