Permanent Residence activated

I’ve been a Permanent Resident of Canada for 50 days now!

We were planning to have a wee recce trip together in the autumn, but it didn’t work out with Tim’s work, so I was resigned to taking a trip in spring 2012. Instead, my PR was confirmed incredibly quickly and I found myself booking a last-minute landing trip to Vancouver in some holiday time I already had booked off from work.

I arrived on a Tuesday night and left on Friday evening, so had very little time to do anything. Keeping close to UK hours meant that I didn’t have any jetlag at all, but I also didn’t have any evening activities or a chance to meet up with Tim’s family.

I won’t bore you with the tourist-y details of my trip, except to say that my highlights were:

• Circle Craft Christmas Market
• Neon exhibition at the Museum of Vancouver
• Seeing the Olympic Cauldron lit up at Canada Place
• Remembrance Day service at Victory Square, including singing ‘O Canada’ with other people for the first time :)
• Getting caught in a torrential thunderstorm on the seawall in Stanley Park

Details of the actual immigration process below...

Landing

The PR confirmation letter says you must provide “goods to follow” and “goods accompanying” lists “when you immigrate”. However, it’s not clear how a landing trip fits in to this! I’m not moving over straight away and my goods weren’t on their way on a container ship. The members of the British Expats Forum have had conflicting experiences with this, so I decided to play it safe and spent a while going around our flat, cataloguing everything we owned! I thought it was better to take the time writing the lists, even if they weren’t looked at, rather than have to write them out while sitting at the airport.

On the flight, everyone had to fill out a customs declaration form, like the one pictured below:

It was fairly self-explanatory and the only difference with filling it in on a normal holiday was ticking the “goods to follow” section.

Once the plane arrived in Vancouver, I followed all the normal “arrivals” signs until I reached passport control. In the picture below, you can see the queues of normal tourists straight ahead, while I was directed around a corridor to the right and into the huge immigration office.

I passed a large (and growing) queue for working and student visas and went straight to the welcome desk, where a very helpful man checked all my papers and gave me a pile of “Welcome to Canada” information – so much stuff that it even came in a CIC plastic bag! He directed me over to the actual immigration officers, where there was only one other person waiting. The woman who dealt with me was lovely and we had a great chat about Scotland, as her father is Glaswegian :)

I explained that I was just landing and was heading back to the UK in a few days and she marked up my customs card and took Tim’s sister’s address for my PR card. She explained that the CIC might not allow the card to be delivered to her, if I was not there to sign for it myself. I had a seat for 5-10 minutes while she filled in some paperwork, then I was called back for some basic “are you a criminal? have you ever been refused a visa?”-type questions, then that was it!

My fancy-looking visa was scored through and the COPR form was folded up and stapled into my passport. Even if I don’t get my PR card before my next visit, the officer said I’ll be able to go through the Canadians’ line with Tim.

I went out to the baggage carousels (right outside the immigration office) and the bags from my flight were only just starting to come through, so I hadn’t taken any longer than a normal tourist.

A Customs guy was stopping everyone on the way out for our declaration cards. I was about to start explaining that I was just landing, but he glanced at the immigration officer’s notes on my card and waved me through immediately.

The actual immigration bit of my trip was incredibly simple and, although I can see why some people find it an anti-climax, I felt so happy and relaxed leaving the airport that I almost skipped onto the SkyTrain!