(It's snowed 15cms yesterday and more is forecast for the end of the week!! It's pretty much April...)
One thing I did expend quite a lot of effort on putting together in the autumn (and then just worrying about thereafter) was my application for permanent residency. Last year Neil and I decided that we'd be awfully sad not to be living together and therefore, it would be awesome if I could somehow stay in Canada. That got the ball rolling on my residency application where Neil sponsored me as his common-law partner.
A lot of people have asked me what this involved, so I thought I'd record a little about the process here. As a side note, a number of my Canadian friends and colleagues are rather surprised to hear how many hoops you have to jump through if you want to stay - they seem like they'd be happy to keep me without all the paper work, it's just a shame the government doesn't agree!
So, in short, you have to send in some forms, some money, a medical and a police certificate; which sounds relatively easy... But in practice, i started looking at the forms in May last year and started collecting relevant documents, then after a final push to get everything together and organised and readable, sent them off at the end of October. So it took a little while.
The first few forms you have to fill in aren't so difficult. They cover your basic information, the class of immigration you are applying for, your family and educational background and your sponsor's information. The form that took pretty much all of the time and effort was the 'sponsored person questionnaire'. This is where you have to give an account and proof of your relationship to your sponsor. So it starts by asking how you met - the easy bit. Although it also asks if gifts were exchanged when you first met your sponsor and whether you are in anyway related to them?! Things you'd never think to ask in the UK (unless you were an immigration consultant, i guess...)
The rest of the form asks you to prove your status as common-law (defined by Canada as living in a spouse-like relationship for at least a year), which is easier said than done when you live in your boyfriend's mum's house... While typically this part would simply require, say, a joint lease agreement, and joint insurance policy on household items or a car or something, we didn't have any of this. We don't have a joint lease, or utility bills, or insurance, and all of Neil's official mail, helpfully, goes to his Penticton address. Moreover, because we met tree planting and did that for two more summers afterwards, we also had three blank months each year with no proof of address at all. Hmm. So in the end I collected my proof of address, from payslips, and after much much persuasion we got something off Neil's university (I can't tell you how much hassle this was though). Additionally, we opened a joint bank account in May, pretty much for the purposes of having something with both our names and an address on (which we now use as fun money for going out and treating one another :) ). For our previous addresses we collected tax forms from the Bike Barn to account for our Augusts, and got Paul (our planting foreman) to get a letter notarized vouching for our relationship in general, and co-habitation specifically, while planting. We, likewise, got a similar letter notarize from Natalie, Neil's mum, saying that we live together in her house and that we are actually a couple with no joint proof whatsoever... Lacking more substantial proof, we also opted to included proof of travel (flights/buses) together and any nights in hotels booked on Neil's card and my email address (this was forward thinking...), which involved trailing though our inboxes looking for confirmations.
Since we are not married, we also have to account for our relationship history. This includes giving dates and proof of trips to see one another prior to living together. For Neil his flight tickets and insurance from visiting me in Italy, for me my Trip to Penticton and Ottawa the first year we met. this was a ticket i just chance upon in my wallet, and it was barely readable, but fortunately did still exist! Beyond this they ask how you communicated in times when you were apart. For us the answer was almost exclusively facebook chat, but also skype, which led me on another long hunt for chat log histories, and yet another hunt for screen captures to authenticate the chat logs, which are just text documents with no identifying features. I followed a similar process when they asked you about gifts/letters/cards that you'd sent to one another. We still had the cards and gifts, which we coped and photographed, but no envelopes with dates - so yet again i cross referenced it it with screen captures of our computer conversations about it... You can see why this took me a while...
After you've done all these specific questions you also have to write an account of your relationship (a horrifically cheesy essay, essentially) and back that up with proof too. Now, by this point, you've already provided just about every scrap of evidence of your relationship that might ever possibly have existed. So the other thing that took me time with this application was to put all of the available evidence into organised appendices and then to cross reference the pieces of evidence with the questions, rather than duplicate an already hefty pile of paper. Question 9, see appendix 6a,8b &c, 9d.... etc... I also got a few more letters of support from friends and Neil's family, saying that we were real people etc and put in about 40 very cheesy photographs to illustrate it.
Finally there was other fiddly bit of paper work that were required - a police check from the UK (despite the fact I'd not lived there for nearly 3 years...), a $200 medical that seemed to think i was healthy enough, an obscure tax form from Neil and both address and travel histories from me for the last 10 years... which as you might imagine were extensive and just generally hard work... Oh, and a thousand bucks...
Once I had got all of this together, i photocopied everything from originals and organised it again in order and went through it about 10 times for fear of missing anything, quietly wondering whether I was qualified to put together my own immigration application, or whether the lawyers fee might be worth it in the end... The problem is, if you miss something - a document or s signature, they don't just ask you to send in the form again, they return the whole application to you and you have to start the process again, setting yourself back a good month or more...
Anyhow, in happy news I sent it all in to Mississauga and about a month later, Neil was approved of as my sponsor. Then the real waiting starts and you don't hear anything for a few months, and cross all of your fingers that they don't want you to come for an interview in London (which is where your application ends up, having been sent all the way to Canada in the first place...). Not that I've anything against going to London, but that's an awfully expensive interview... Thankfully, after a mercifully short wait, in the grand scheme of things, I got my COPR (Confirmation of permanent residence) though at the beginning of the month, and having been gently winding down from the stress of applying, and not know what was going to happen, ever since. Weirdly enough, you can't just be granted this status, you have to take the 2 pieces of paper that grant it to you all the way to the states and re-enter the country before its official. Goodness knows why... but fortunately the border is only an hour away. And so it is that on this fine spring day (8*c!!! And only 15cms of fresh snow on the ground...) we drove down to the border, got ourselves refused from the states and re-entered. the lovely man who wanted to go on his lunch, was fantastically quick at entering my information (no coincidence...) and before long he had answered all my questions and congratulated me.
As of today, I am a citizen of the UK and an official resident of Canada - not a bad combination!!! :D I've almost forgotten the paperwork already...
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