Some background: I'm a Canadian citizen who has been living in China for 7+ years. My Wife is Chinese and we have been married for 6 years. We had our son here almost 2 years ago.
We are preparing to move back to Canada, but we want to get our son's Canadian citizenship certificate and passport before we make plans to move back to Canada. According to several sources, he is eligible for Canadian citizenship through me. I'm his biological father and my name is on his Chinese birth certificate.
We have decided to apply online and in China for several reasons, but we are worried about a few details that, if any error is made, could result in him being denied.
The biggest concern we have is with his digital photo. The application has extremely specific instructions about the photo, but the part that worries us is this instruction which I will quote here:
"You must also upload the photographer's information (name, address and date at which the photo was taken) ... We accept the photographer's receipt or a text file"
If we were in Canada, this would be easily accomplished at a Walmart photo center or any similar place, bur here in China, these services are nonexistent.
The only choices are small private photographers who own kiosks in shopping malls and mostly take ID photographs, but they are not professional and wouldn't be competent enough to follow the extremely strict instructions for this photo.
The only other options are professional photographers who deal mostly in wedding photos, baby photo albums, and modeling. All their experience is with editing and beautifying photos (which is expressly forbidden by the certificate photo instructions). They would be equally out of their depth with a request like this.
Even if we somehow convince these photographers to attempt this unprecedented request, is the company name, address, and receipt (translated I assume) really going to be sufficient for the officers who evaluate his application? It doesn't seem very official. Can anyone offer some suggestions for my somewhat unique dilemma?
We are preparing to move back to Canada, but we want to get our son's Canadian citizenship certificate and passport before we make plans to move back to Canada. According to several sources, he is eligible for Canadian citizenship through me. I'm his biological father and my name is on his Chinese birth certificate.
We have decided to apply online and in China for several reasons, but we are worried about a few details that, if any error is made, could result in him being denied.
The biggest concern we have is with his digital photo. The application has extremely specific instructions about the photo, but the part that worries us is this instruction which I will quote here:
"You must also upload the photographer's information (name, address and date at which the photo was taken) ... We accept the photographer's receipt or a text file"
If we were in Canada, this would be easily accomplished at a Walmart photo center or any similar place, bur here in China, these services are nonexistent.
The only choices are small private photographers who own kiosks in shopping malls and mostly take ID photographs, but they are not professional and wouldn't be competent enough to follow the extremely strict instructions for this photo.
The only other options are professional photographers who deal mostly in wedding photos, baby photo albums, and modeling. All their experience is with editing and beautifying photos (which is expressly forbidden by the certificate photo instructions). They would be equally out of their depth with a request like this.
Even if we somehow convince these photographers to attempt this unprecedented request, is the company name, address, and receipt (translated I assume) really going to be sufficient for the officers who evaluate his application? It doesn't seem very official. Can anyone offer some suggestions for my somewhat unique dilemma?
