Hi All,
My in-laws' PR application was finally approved today with IRCC dispatching their passports with one-time visa (I know it was approved because GCKey account says so with details of their one-time visa which is valid for 1 year from the date IRCC received their medical results). You can find the detailed timeline in my signature, but I wanted to shed some light on another topic, which seems to be of common confusion/concern on this forum.
My in-laws received passport submission request on Oct 23, 2023. At that time, they were in Canada but were planning to leave for US in a week's time. For family reasons, they could only extend their trip for a month as they needed to be in the US by US thanksgiving (i.e. around Nov 20). We decided to take a chance and go for virtual landing. We sent a note to IRCC, requesting virtual landing for them on the same day. However, IRCC never got back to us asking for follow-up information. Around Nov 10th, we realized that we wouldn't have enough time to *initiate* virtual landing process, so we decided that the in-laws would go to US asap, and send their passports to VFS for stamping. We sent the passports to VFS around Nov 12/13 and after some missing documentation which we separately provided, they were forwarded to IRCC on Nov 22 for further processing (last day of their 30 day window - phew!!). After a silence of about two weeks, we received a notification that IRCC has sent the decision envelope back to VFS. Their GCKey account show application was approved and shows details of one-time visa as well.
Hope this helps someone who's in similar situation.