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Immigrant

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Finally!

February 3, 2023 in Moving to Canada | Permalink

Clearly a day to celebrate!

Back in May 2012 The Girl was about to pay a visit to the UK so that she could attend her citizenship ceremony…

Those who have not been following this saga since I started blogging back in January 2012 may start scratching their heads at this point and wondering about the chronology… Actually, it is all quite simple. The Girl came to Victoria in March that year to take up a job opportunity that was (or appeared to be) too good to miss out on. I remained in the UK and the plan was that I would retire early in the summer of 2013 and join her in Canada at that point. Quite apart from the fact that living – er! – apart, was actually itself a very silly idea – as it turned out so was her taking the job. Later in the year it all went spectacularly tits-up and we ended up back in England for another couple of years.

However, back in May 2012 she had already applied for – and been granted – British Citizenship. The ceremony at the end of May was the end of that little chapter in this long and complex story.

The reason that I mention it at all is because her citizenship ceremony provided me with a suitable trigger to initiate my first attempt at applying for Permanent Residency for Canada – an essential prerequisite to moving here. How that process – and the whole move itself – panned out is the very basis for this online journal. Safe to say that it turned out to be quite a saga. If the details are of interest (perhaps you are contemplating such a move yourself) then searching the archive for posts in the category ‘Moving to Canada’ will reveal all – and then some!

Two rounds of PR applications (her return to the UK put the first attempt on hold) – retirement and the move to British Columbia in 2015 – a five year period living here before I could apply for citizenship – that lengthy process itself, culminating in my Citizenship Ceremony in the fall of last year – and finally, the slightly bumpy ride of applying for a Canadian passport to add to my UK one. All this has taken somewhat more than a decade to come to fruition, but today… today…!

…my passport was finally delivered!

Whooo-hoo!!

There it is at the top of the page, nestling up to my British passport. So – we are now both fully ‘citizened’ up and documented to travel…

…of which more in the next post!

 

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The power of ten

January 27, 2022 in Life as we know it | 2 comments

I posted to this forum a little under a year ago a somewhat reflective missive entitled ‘Time Passes’. The subject of that post was this very journal; the trigger for my writing it the circumstance that the ninth anniversary of my very first blog post had then but recently occurred.

I pondered the actuality that I had certainly not set out to embark on a project that would shamble on for quite such a long time – its longevity having surprised me just as much as I imagine it would anyone else who devoted so much as a moment’s thought to the matter.

I wrapped up that epistle by musing that – having gotten so close – I really did feel inclined to keep things going for long enough that my efforts would have encompassed an entire decade!

And here we are! Hoorah!!

I can’t help thinking that some sort of celebration might be in order, though not – heaven forfend – anything that breaches Covid protocols (or indeed breaks the law). I am not sure what form that might sensibly take.

Last year I included some statistics – for them as likes such things. Here they are again – but updated (with last year’s figures in brackets).

In the nine ten years that I have been writing this blog I have written 1025 (925) posts (averaging just over 100 posts a year – approximately two a week). If the internal statistics are to be believed I have written a little over 401,000 (365,000) words in that time and uploaded some 2,845 (2,590) images – many of them my own photographs.

As I wrote last year – “Not bad, huh“?!

In last year’s post I toyed with the notion of it long being time to wind things up. In the light of some most kind and affirmative remarks from gentle readers I determined instead to keep things going.

My thought this year would be that I could perhaps reduce the frequency of my posts, from the current average of around two a week to just a single weekly post. It is not that I mind the discipline of knocking out regular posts but as I get older I do wonder if there is still enough of interest on which to report.

Do let me know what you think…

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Time passes

February 3, 2021 in Life as we know it | Permalink

Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.

Marcel Proust

I receive a sharp reminder once a year of the passage of time… and in particular of the passage of time since I started writing this blog. That reminder comes in the form of the renewal demand from my hosting company for the pleasure of supporting my various websites – of which this blog was the first, having been created back in 2012. I started blogging at the end of January that year so now is the time that I must stump up in order that I may continue so to do.

For those gentle readers who don’t really get this whole blogging thing – there was a time when blogging was all the rage. That was the few years before I took it up, naturally, and by the time had I started keeping this journal the youngsters were already saying – “Blogging?… Nah!”

Now, of course, I am nearly a whole decade further behind the times – and you know what? – I really don’t care that I am old-fashioned. I am sixty seven, for goodness sake. I am allowed to be old fashioned.

For those of you who like statistics – in the nine years that I have been writing this blog I have written 925 posts (averaging just over 100 posts a year – approximately two a week). If the internal statistics are to be believed I have written nearly 365,000 words in that time and uploaded some 2,590 images – many of them my own photographs.

Not bad, huh?!

I started blogging when I learned that The Girl was going to take up a good job here in Victoria, even though I still needed to work for a few more years in the UK before I could retire and move to Canada to be with her. Faced with the prospect of carrying on a long distance relationship with an eight hour time difference I figured that I would need to find things to occupy my time (other than working!). When her job fell through and she came back to the UK some ten months later I decided to keep the blog going – documenting our eventual move to British Columbia, which was rescheduled for 2015.

I could have stopped once we settled here but I decided to keep it going – as a way of keeping a foot on both continents. I am blessed to have regular readers on both sides of the pond who seem happy to keep up with my chunterings.

Has the blog changed much? It is certainly less verbose than it used to be and I don’t reach for the thesaurus quite as much as once I did. I enjoyed getting to explore the language and to play little games with prose, but as I have grown older so have I started to keep things a little more simple – more straightforward. I have noticed that I do the same with song lyrics – which is no bad thing…

Having made it this far I will, naturally, be shooting for the complete decade.

After that – who knows?

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Out with the old

December 19, 2020 in Moving to Canada | Permalink

Just for completeness – and who doesn’t like a little completeness – I thought I should wrap up my thread from earlier in the year about having to apply for a new Permanent Resident card (documented here and here). Well – I finally have it – and here it is:

You will notice that I have intentionally blurred some of the detail for security reasons. My face – on the other hand – usually looks like that first thing in the morning!

This is the old and now redundant card – strangely suffering from a similar lack of focus.

It struck me – as I was manipulating these images – that there is perhaps something a little perverse in having a Permanent Resident Card that must be renewed every five years.

That seems to be a whole new definition of ‘permanent’.

The instructions that came with the new card dictated that the old one should be destroyed. Naturally I did as I was directed: herewith the proof:

Hmmm! I think one of my projects for 2021 must be to try to get my citizenship sorted out.

Onward and upward!

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Eddies…

October 18, 2020 in Moving to Canada | Permalink

“I have detected,” he said, “disturbances in the wash.”
“The wash?” said Arthur.
“The space-time wash,” said Ford.
Arthur nodded, and then cleared his throat.
“Are we talking about,” he asked cautiously, “some sort of Vogon laundromat, or what are we talking about?”
“Eddies,” said Ford, “in the space-time continuum.”
“Ah,” nodded Arthur, “is he? Is he?” He pushed his hands into the pocket of his dressing gown and looked knowledgeably into the distance.
“What?” said Ford.
“Er, who,” said Arthur, “is Eddy, then, exactly?”
Ford looked angrily at him.
“Will you listen?” he snapped.
“I have been listening,” said Arthur, “but I’m not sure it’s helped.”

Douglas Adams – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

I received the other day an email from ‘Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada’ (funny! – I don’t recall that title previously including the ‘refugees’ bit!) concerning my application to renew my Permanent Resident card. This missive included the paragraph:

“This confirms that your application for your Permanent Resident card has been received by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) on 2020/07/08.”

Making allowance for the fact that here in Canada dates can appear in a variety of odd formats – though not in the correct one (to an Englishman at least) – I calculate that this means that my application was received by the IRCC on July 8th this year – the which would be about right.

I am – perhaps understandably – a little mystified as to why they should send me an email to advise me of this fact on October 14th.

The email also advises me that I can check the progress of my application by visiting the appropriate part of the IRCC website and entering my Unique Client Identifier (UCI). Perhaps – I muse – they have just started processing my application – which might account for their sudden correspondence.

I follow the guidelines.The IRCC website claims never to have heard of me!

I wade through the notes trying to establish why I might appear to be missing from the system. The site helpfully informs me that this is probably because my application has not yet made it to the processing stage – and until is has I officially don’t exist.

Sooooo… Three months after I submit my application IRCC randomly sends me an acknowledgement, even though they have not – and apparently have no intention of – actually looking at it anytime soon.

No – I don’t get it either. What is it about bureaucracies?

 

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Never simple

July 24, 2020 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple”

Oscar Wilde

It need hardly be said that the truth is far from being the only thing that is ‘never simple’ and I could – at this point – be referring to any one of a great number of subjects. Those who pursue the many strands of this online delectus will not, however, be surprised at my current target.

As divulged within these meditations but a few posts back, I am currently engaged with the relevant authorities in the pursuit of an application for Canadian citizenship, as well as for the renewal of both my Canadian permanent residence card and my UK passport. Anything connected to citizenship or passports can be guaranteed to conceal a veritable minefield of obstacles, obfuscation, obstruction, obscurement and obduration.

The opening salvoes in this particular engagement were fired back at the start of July and things had reached the point – I surmised – that it was time to sit back and to wait for the inevitable interminable months to pass before anything further happened.

With regard to my UK passport renewal I had – as directed – completed and submitted the online application form and – somewhat nervously – entrusted my current passport to Canada Post (cue sharp intake of breath) in the expectation that it would wing its way back over the pond to Durham (in the UK) whence it had originally come.

Somewhat to my surprise I received, a couple of days ago, an email from the UK Passport Office advising me to do (again?) what I had already done. Naturally I had sent the precious document by recorded delivery, so I was able to check the tracking log. According to Canada Post’s records my passport had been delivered to Durham on July 9th – some two weeks ago. I figured that the best thing to do was to call the UK Passport Office to check that it had – in fact – arrived.

Easier said than done, of course!

Using Skype to make a trans-Atlantic call at a reasonable rate I suffered the expected multiple attempts at connection before finally a ‘ring tone’ was heard and I shortly thereafter found myself listening to the usual robotic instructions. After the familiar ritual of the system refusing to acknowledge that I had in fact pressed the numbers that I had, I reached – on the fourth or fifth attempt – an accommodation with the insensate automaton by which it agreed to connect me with my desired service if I were prepared first to listen to a whole bunch of badly recorded music punctuated by incessant and identical informational missives.

Eventually the call was picked up – not by a real live human (oh no!) but by another machine. This one had but a single purpose in mind. It demanded that I key-in a telephone number on which I could – at some unspecified point in the future – be called back. I could not – naturally – recall the correct recipe for calling Canada from the UK in the first instance, but eventually the machine seemed to be satisfied and abruptly disconnected me.

I thought that I had better check what was likely to happen next, so I approached the InterWebNet with a suitable query to determine what experiences others had had with this ‘service’. I rapidly discovered that my call-back might be anything up to about three days in coming. Given that there is an eight hour time difference between the west coast of Canada and the cathedral city of Durham it further seemed likely that the call would come sometime in the middle of the night – assuming that whoever made the call might not figure out that he – or she – was calling the far side of the world.

The Girl made it clear that this meant one or more nights on the sofa for me as she had no intention of being woken at some god-forsaken hour by a disinterested British bureaucrat.

I was sleeping the sleep of the just at five thirty the following morning when the phone duly rang.

“Good afternoon” – quoth a British voice (betraying the fact that – as suspected – my being a number of time-zones away from Blighty had escaped their notice) – “How can I help?“. The transition from being in deep REM sleep to having to explain why I was calling the far side of world went more successfully than might have been expected and the northern gentleman explained that – though my passport had undoubtedly reached them on July 9th, it would take a further ten to fourteen days for it to be entered into the ‘system’ – and until such time as it had done so the clock did not start ticking on the processing of my application.

There was a brief pause as we each mentally ticked off the two weeks that had already elapsed since my passport had reached Durham.

“I expect it will show up any day now” – he said, slightly unconvincingly. I mentioned that I lived on the west coast of Canada – more than anything to let him know why I felt so exposed as a result of not being in possession of a passport. “Ah!” – he exclaimed, unable to hide a note of triumph in his voice. “If you have sent your passport from abroad it takes three weeks for it to appear on the system!“.

Riiiiiiight!

Oh well – nothing to do but to wait – and to simply swat away any further spurious requests to send back my precious passport.

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Good form…

July 13, 2020 in Moving to Canada | Permalink

…good grief!

Way back in the early days of this journal – May 16th 2012 to be precise – I posted to these pages an entry entitled “A Tough Occupation“. That was the first mention amidst this griffonage of a subject that was to become a major preoccupation over the following three years… my application for Permanent Resident status within Canada.

Should this subject be of the remotest interest to the gentle reader (you might perhaps be engaged upon a similar journey yourself) a subsequent post of May 20th 2015 – entitled “It’s Official!” – not only celebrated the eventual successful outcome of the application but also catalogued all of the prior posts on the subject. Useful – perhaps – should one wish to know just how the long and tortuous process can unfold.

It will not take a degree in rocket science to deduce in short order the motivation for this particular post. It is – after all – exactly one week until the fifth anniversary of our ‘landing’ upon these shores – an occasion that is not without its implications, for once one has been a resident in Canada for five years one may – subject to a variety of other criteria – apply for citizenship. Needless to say this is something that I firmly intend to do.

There are – however – other important things to be addressed first.

I think I was vaguely aware that my Permanent Resident Card was only valid for five years, but in all the excitement of finally being here I did not look too closely at what would need to be done to extend that period. I made the naive assumption that all I would need to do would be to fill out some online application, pay a fee and a new card would rapidly pop into our mailbox.

Nothing so simple!

It turns out that another complex form must be completed (IMM 5444 (09-2019) E) – which demands details on everywhere one has lived since arriving, everywhere one has worked and everywhere one has traveled outwith Canadian borders. The fee must be paid and the receipt submitted, new photos must be taken (in the prescribed format) and signed appropriately by the photographer and copies of primary identification and existing PR card added to the submission. Once this has all been dispatched as directed one can sit back and await the delivery of one’s new card – in nine months time!

What?!

If this weren’t bad enough 2020 also happens to mark the tenth anniversary of my wedding to the Kickass Canada Girl. That is in itself, of course, a significant cause for celebration (on which more in subsequent posts) but another consideration arises therefrom. We took each other’s names when we married and that process entailed acquiring replacement passports. My UK passport thus expires at the end of this year and must also be renewed.

Now – a UK passport can reasonably easily be renewed from Canada (in this age of digital photography) by means of an online application – though the UK Passport Office do their level best to dissuade non-critical applications in these times of plague (presumably once it has become critical they would shrug their digital shoulders and suggest that the application should have been made sooner!). Anyway – I applied – not wanting to be without any means of moving between my birth and adoptive countries.

The problem is, however, that the UK Passport Office requires one to physically return one’s old passport before they will process the online application – thus surely rendering this modernised online version somewhat redundant. As a result one finds oneself worrying lacking in international documentation for an unspecified length of time…

…and I have not yet begun even to look at the citizenship application!

Sigh!

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Full house

October 30, 2015 in Life in BC | Permalink

Photo by Andy Dawson ReidThree months and eleven days have elapsed since I landed in British Columbia clutching my Confirmation of Permanent Residency (COPR) documentation.

In this post – dating from a few days before we left the UK in July – I mused upon the unsettlingly stateless limbo in which we found ourselves at that point, having divested ourselves of all of those accoutrements by which one’s existence is normally defined.

As documented a few days subsequent to our arrival in Victoria I had rapidly commenced the task of constructing a new Canadian identity. It has taken a while but I am delighted to report that the process is now pretty much complete.

Over the past few weeks a variety of critical markers – in the form of credit card sized identity cards – have dropped into our Community Mailbox…

A digression for non-Canadians… Until recently the majority of inhabitants of this brave young country were blessed – as we yet are in the UK – with a postal service that provided door to door deliveries. Now – for all of the usual painful reasons – that service is being curtailed. Even since we took up residence in our North Saanich home the familiar sight of the year-round shorts-appareled post person has been replaced by a roadside stack of ‘Community Mailboxes’ for which we have all been issued keys. In our case this now means a quarter of a mile trek up the road – in all weathers naturally – to see if we have mail. That’s ‘progress’… and indeed ‘service’!

Enough! Back to identity cards. I have recently taken delivery of the following:

  • my Permanent Resident card. Hooray! I now officially exist.
  • a permanent Driver’s License – to replace the temporary document that I have been toting around with me.
  • my British Columbia Services Card. This precious piece of plastic signifies that I have now not only met the residency requirements for eligibility but am a fully paid up member of the BC Medical Services Plan (MSP).

I think it is now safe to say that I am no longer a non-person.

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Starting over

July 24, 2015 in Moving to Canada | Permalink

Image from Pixabay“It’ll be just like starting over – starting over”

John Lennon

Wow!

This has been quite a week. Having stripped our lives right back to the bone in the UK before we departed those shores we are now frantically putting them together again here in Victoria. I don’t know when the relaxation part of retirement is going to kick in, but it sure as heck ain’t gonna be just yet.

The days have thus far been just too busy for me to be able to find the time to post, but this end of (working!) week catch-up will hopefully hold back the rising tide of impatience amongst those readers who want to know just what the devil is going on with the immigrants and homecoming queens here on the Pacific northwest coast.

Well – this is what the Kickass Canada Girl and I have done this week.

We have:

  • visited the Victoria Canada Service Centre to acquire for me a Social Insurance Number (SIN). This is necessary should one wish to work in BC or to be able to access other government services.
  • been to the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia (ICBC) office to trade our UK driving licences for temporary BC equivalents.
  • paid a visit to the bank to set up a chequing account for me and to apply for credit cards.
  • commenced our search for somewhere to live (or rather, moved our previous online search onto the real streets of Saanich).
  • sent off registration details and applications for Health Insurance Cards (BC Services Cards). Though these will not come into effect for three months (meaning that we had to take out three months travel health cover before setting out) when the cards arrive they can be used as proof of identity to turn our new temporary driving licences into permanent versions.
  • completed and posted the application for my UK pension incomes to be taxed in Canada.
  • had a meeting with a mortgage broker to get some advice regarding the existing mortgage on the Girl’s son’s condo (apartment).
  • been to view – and shortly thereafter to purchase – a convertible for the Girl, to replace the much loved vehicle that had to be traded away just before we left the UK.
  • been to view a suitable 4×4 for me. The vehicle concerned had not at that point been staged, so a return trip is on the cards tomorrow.
  • viewed yet more houses – including paying a second visit to one that we liked a great deal and on which we subsequently made an offer! At this point we discovered that the real estate market in Canada is just as non-functional as that in the UK, though in different ways. At the point of writing it doesn’t look as though we will actually get this house, but this would appear to be because the vendors – although they have gone to the trouble of listing it – do not actually seem to want to sell it!

Well – I think all might agree that this represents rather a good week’s work. We – at any rate – are quite worn out, though at the same time really somewhat impressed with the progress that has been made.

Phew!

And so to bed…

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The eagle has…

July 21, 2015 in Moving to Canada | 2 comments

image…no, no – that’s just a little too obvious!

Let’s just say that the Immigrant is Imperceptible no longer (though I like the tag so much that I most certainly intend continuing my use of it).

When I last posted concerning my attempt to become a Permanent Resident of Canada I described to process to the point – which had then just been reached – at which my Confirmation of Permanent Residence (COPR) had arrived in the post. All that remained – I wrote – was for me to ‘land’ in Canada.

The process is this:

The COPR document is essentially a temporary visa with an expiry date by which point the applicant must have ‘landed’ in Canada. Upon ‘landing’ the temporary visa is replaced by more permanent documentation and the applicant becomes a resident of Canada. This is done at the ‘port of entry’ into Canada.

Thus, when I landed on Sunday morning at Vancouver International I was directed to the Immigration hall, triaged by a very polite young man and then passed over to the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) for a brief interview and document processing.

Having heard that this might be a lengthy process we had arranged an hiatus in our journey at this point of some three hours before catching the connecting flight on to Victoria. Of course, when we entered the Immigration hall it was almost entirely empty, save for the helpful young man, a suitably stern CBSA lady and our good selves. As a result the whole operation was completed in around thirty minutes and we found ourselves with a considerable amount of time to kill before we could take the last step of our long trek.

For the record, the CBSA lady did not issue any new documentation – she merely stamped the existing COPR document. The final PR card will apparently catch up with me later. The stern lady also assisted us with our customs declaration which she need not have done, though as the centre was so quiet she seemed happy to do the leg work for us. She filled out Form B4 – ‘Personal Effects Accounting Document‘ (eschewing the copy that I had prepared earlier) – and stamped the printed copies of the spreadsheet that I had provided listing the ‘Goods to Follow’ which comprise the contents of our shipping container.

Now, I have to say that – compared to the preceding elements of the process – ‘landing’ could not have been accomplished in a more easeful and efficient manner. My thanks to the Canada Border Services Agency for helping to make my arrival go as smoothly as it did.

And as just about everyone has extended to me thus far – “Welcome to Canada”.

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