Longer answer:
kazemiakk said:
Hello All,
I read all the topics, however, I could not find a answer for my case I appreciate if you help me with my question.
I got my Canadian residency in June 2014 and stayed in Canada for two months and then went back to US. Now I am living in US for 2.5 years and have not been to Canada since September 2014. My PR card expires in 2019. I know based on the rules if I dont meet 2 out of 5 year rule, I miss my residency status. However, I read different topics saying that I can enter to Canada before expiration date of my PR and ask for renewal if I stay 2 years in Canada.
I am PhD student in US and want to graduate in fall 2017 to find a job in US and maybe stay here. Otherwise, I do not want to loos my Canadian residency.
Do you think I can renew my PR card with no issue I enter to Canada for example in 2019 (before card expiration)?
Also, I asked CSBA to give me my exit from Canada. They send me the report with showing that I dont have any exit in their record. Does it mean they think I am still in Canada?
The Residency Obligation for Canadian Permanent Residents is the
minimum amount of time the PR must be present in Canada in order to keep Permanent Resident status. There are exceptions and other possible credits toward meeting the obligation, but the basic requirement is straight forward. Thus, to keep your PR status, you must be in Canada enough to be in compliance with the PR RO. Failure to be in compliance with the PR RO subjects the PR to being deemed
inadmissible and losing PR status.
The PR RO is actually simple:
-- between the date of landing and the fifth year anniversary of that date, the PR (in effect the
new PR) must
NOT be outside Canada for 1095 days or more
-- as of the fifth year anniversary of the date the PR landed and became a PR, the PR must
always have been in Canada for at least 730 days in the preceding five years and again this is
always, as in each and every day
-- expiration date on a PR card is
NOT relevant
In other words: to keep your PR status, you will need to come to Canada and live in Canada, and basically you have until September 2017 (assuming you were in Canada from date of landing until September 2014) to do this, to come to Canada and live in Canada.
Some particulars:
Overall, if at some point before June 2019 you have been outside Canada for 1095 or more days, you will then be in breach of the PR Residency Obligation, which means you would be subject to being deemed inadmissible, which would result in the loss of your Permanent Resident status.
Again, the expiration date on your PR card is largely NOT relevant.
If, for example, you landed and became a Canadian PR in June 2014 and stayed until leaving Canada September 1, 2014, technically you could remain outside Canada until August 31, 2017 (until you have been absent from Canada 1094 days) and still be in compliance with your PR Residency Obligation. But then you would need to remain in Canada, without leaving at all, until the summer of 2019.
Beyond that, for the indefinite future, it is
possible to maintain PR status despite not fully settling in Canada permanently, by in effect juggling one's location enough to never be outside Canada a total of 1095 days within the previous five years. The practical reality, however, is that being a Canadian PR is about settling and living in Canada
permanently, if not sooner then at least not much later. Cutting-it-close on a long term basis tends to not work. Technically it is possible. Practically, usually, it tends to not work out all that well.
A sidebar observation (re who knows what et al):
kazemiakk said:
Also, I asked CSBA to give me my exit from Canada. They send me the report with showing that I dont have any exit in their record. Does it mean they think I am still in Canada?
CBSA does not "think." It is a bureaucracy. (I do not mean to be flippant, especially since I too have often personified CBSA and IRCC relative to what the bureaucracy "perceives" or thinks or such . . . but the context here invokes an important aspect of bureaucratic processing which should help us understand better the difference between information and decision-making.)
The short overview is that when the government provides the individual with a copy of its records about the individual, there is no cognitive or analytical assessment involved. It is an electronically generated copy of a limited, formal report, containing information retrieved from specified fields in specified databases.
Understanding this is important, because it no where near represents what an officer in that bureaucracy would "think" or infer or conclude when conducting an assessment.
For example: while IRCC routinely obtains a travel history report from CBSA regarding an individual (such as one undergoing a Residency Obligation compliance assessment . . . typically referred to as a "Residency Determination"), which is probably very similar to the one the individual can obtain a copy of for himself or herself, there will indeed be an actual person doing this, and that person can access and compare and analyze and evaluate information from multiple sources. Moreover, CBSA can, when properly queried, access information maintained by other government bodies,
including some foreign governments, and especially the United States.
Bottom-line: what is indicated in a CBSA travel history report, including a report to be shared with the individual who is the subject of that report, is a bare-bones electronic copy of bits of information derived by extracting that information from database fields. It does not represent anywhere near all the information that CBSA or IRCC can or will look at and consider if and when CBSA or IRCC is evaluating that individual, is engaged in making some decision about that individual. In this regard, there are multiple ways in which IRCC can obtain some direct information about an individual PR's exits from Canada, and a lot of ways it can obtain indirect information from which an officer can make inferences about an individual PR's exits and entries.
There is one and only one best way to approach what CBSA or IRCC knows about an individual's exits and entries: when requested, the PR needs to accurately and completely report all trips, no exceptions. Thus, PRs should keep an ongoing, up-to-date, complete travel log, accurately recording each and every occasion the PR exits and enters Canada. Those who fail to do this tend to run into problems sooner or later (unless their travels are few and obvious and easy to reconstruct, and thus can be
completely and precisely, accurately, reconstructed).
Just for example: CBSA travel history typically does not specify dates a PR exited Canada. There are multiple ways a CBSA or IRCC officer conducting a Residency Determination, or engaged in a Residency Examination, can nonetheless find and consider both direct and indirect information regarding the PR's exits. For PRs who exit Canada to enter the U.S., for example, CBSA and IRCC can obtain the U.S. records for that individual's entries into the U.S.
This is just one example. Obviously, an Access to Information request to Canadian authorities will not reveal what a Canadian government body
can find or figure out . . . all the access to information laws require is for the Canadian government body to do is share its information it currently has for the individual, not share what it can obtain in the course of a future assessment.
It is outright foolish to think an individual officer in the government will not identify omissions, discrepancies, or misrepresentations of facts like travel history.
Reminder: misrepresentation, even to personnel at a PoE, can result in not just being deemed inadmissible, leading to loss of PR status, but is a criminal offense and can lead to spending some time behind bars. Sure, like scores and scores of people flaunt driving laws, like speed limits, many, many get away with fudging information they give to the government . . . but getting a speeding ticket is merely an expense, but getting caught making a misrepresentation for the purpose of obtaining entry into Canada can be a very serious matter.
Caution: this forum appears to have many participants suffering from CBSA or IRCC not being convinced that the individual was actually in Canada all the time the individual claims to have been in Canada. If one goes by reports and protests in this forum, for example, the problem is often not so much about whether the government knows when an individual left Canada, but about the individual convincing the government he or she did not leave while the government seems to suspect otherwise. And indeed, the burden of proof is always on the PR. Which is to say, the government does not need to prove a PR left Canad, but rather the burden is always on the PR to prove he or she was in Canada.
