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:

"...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.

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.

Counting Canadians abroad

From an article in today's Globe and Mail:

Research by the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada suggests there are perhaps nearly three million Canadians abroad. As a share of the population, Canada's "diaspora" is larger than the overseas communities of the United States, Australia, China or India.

...

Sixty-four per cent of Canadians abroad consider Canada "home." Interestingly, naturalized Canadians living abroad are more likely to call Canada home than native-born Canadians — a finding that challenges the view that return migrants are somehow less Canadian because they have chosen not to live in Canada.

...

Nearly 70 per cent intend to return to Canada to establish their principal residence. Overseas Canadians originally from British Columbia are most likely to return to establish their principal residence, followed by Canadians originally from Ontario. The two most important reasons for returning to Canada are family and quality of life. Fewer than one in five respondents identified Canada's health care or social services as a reason for returning.

...

The emergence of a Canadian diaspora is not a transient phenomenon. It is the flip side of large immigration inflows over the past two decades, and a function of global competition for skilled workers. To some extent, outmigration is a response to the difficulty that many new immigrants face in finding suitable work in Canada. But a far more important reason for the rise in Canadians overseas is the burgeoning economic opportunities in immigrant source countries such as India and China.

Beaten to a pulp

Canadian forestry industry realizes it's getting its ass kicked by Finnish forestry industry. Details on this and other interesting non-World Cup hockey related Canada vs. Finland facts laid out by the excellent Konrad Yakabuski in ROB online.

Approaching normal

As moving madness blurs into holiday madness, I can feel a shift to a new stage in our little immi experiment. We're mastering the morning rush, we know which shops have which stuff (we even made rye bread and squeaky cheese), we have our brunch place and a few well-kept secrets, our friends are used to our being in the same area code. I've even been back to Edmonton twice already, with another trip coming soon. And if Mr. O gets this job, which is (dare I say) likely, then things will be different/improving/almost normal.
Okay, so Mr. O is still judging Finland vs. Canada matches in his head on a daily basis, but he's also starting to see that both places have both advantages and disadvantages. A woman I know who moved here from Denmark more than 40 years ago told me the other day that the thing that appealed to her about this place was that nobody was going to carry you through, you really had to make your own way. And it's true. While I'll never stop believing in the basic social net that the Nordic countries have so perfected, and you'll never convince me that free universal daycare and post-secondary education are anything but pretty damn sweet, I can see a point there. Living in Finland, you start to expect that the government will clean up every mess - the rampant alcoholism that spread its ugly all over our old neighbourhood comes to mind - and so the individual need not ever stick his neck out. Canadians, with their head-up-ass time-waste of a government, suffer from no such illusions. Even in Toronto, which is the quintessential every-man-for-himself city, people still help each other out. It's a ultra-thin lining, but there it is all the same.
A week ago, we were seriously talking about picking up and heading back to Stockholm, where Mr. O would have a sweet job and I'd take a Swedish course, make meatballs. In a way, it feels like the easy option. On the other hand, the thought of packing alone gives me vertigo. And Mr. O, fed up as he was, couldn't give up on the few plans we've already made on this continent next summer: a trip down south for a family wedding, a weekend at the Folk Fest with my sibs. There are still things we need to do here, and so Stockholm will have to wait. So will Berlin, and Helsinki, and all the other places we still want to go. Now that things have calmed down a bit move-wise, we can take a bit of time to have a good time, or just do nothing at all.

National occupation

So Mr O. is, for the second time in a month, *this* close to scoring a real job. In fact, they'd like him to start next week. Trouble is, you know what the trouble is: six weeks' wait and a long detour to the CHC in London. Whether or not he could apply through a domestic office because he is already in Canada on a temporary permit is unclear.

With a bit of digging, however, it seems that there is a potential short cut: jobs listed on the "National Occupational List" are eligible for concurrent processing, which means that we can send in the visa application before receiving an LMO - which means saving around two weeks.

BUT - and there is always a but - the catch is that, in order to qualify, the application has to go through a foreign office, i.e. CHC. Which would suggest that otherwise he could go through a domestic office, or that as a temporary resident he's not eligible at all. We shall see.

On the clock

E-cas update: Mr. O's file is officially "in process" as of last Monday (although the updates don't appear till Tuesday, we discovered) - exactly 29 days later. Total count to date: 33 days and counting.

Thus spake the mighty e-cas:

"We received your application for permanent residence on October 29, 2007.

We started processing your application on November 26, 2007."

So longer than most of my peeps on immigration.ca, but still in under a month. I bite my tongue.