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.

Countdowns within countdowns

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!

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?

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.