fayexume said:
I recently got CoPR and need to do the landing to officially become a PR. I am living in Toronto and have always planned to land through peace bridge because of its famous U-turn without getting admin refusal from the United States since I do not have a US visa. However, I've done more research these few days to prepare for the landing and read from multiple sources that peace bridge has changed their policy and an admin refusal from the United States is a must now.
I am pretty sure that an admin refusal will not affect my future US visits as a visitor but nobody can say this with 100% certainty. So I am actually considering taking a short trip to Cuba or other visa-exempt Caribbean countries as a workaround. I could not find any information on this approach so I am wondering whether anybody in this forum has experience in this. Are there any landmines that I need to watch out for by landing from Caribbean?
Thank you.
Faye
I think the best way for me to say thank you to the people who helped me at this forum is to provide a closure to the discussion that I started and share my experience wherever I can.
I landed at Pearson Airport from a Cuba trip one week after I wrote this post.
Everything went pretty smooth in our landing process. The only hiccup, if anything, is that my partner had to go through some scrutiny when checking-in at the flight when we were departing from Toronto. My partner's multi-entry TRV was already expired and the Permanent Resident Visa is a single-entry visa. The airline agent was concerned that my partner might have used the single-entry visa and would not be able to return to Canada. Obviously the visa had not been used and eventually it was all sorted out for us to board the plane to Cuba.
The landing which happened upon our return from Cuba was very short and sweet. Most of the Cuba return flights are at midnight and we intentionally booked an afternoon flight to Toronto for the simple reason of trying to be at our best shape during the landing process. We might have overdone this. When passing through the custom, we just let the border officer know that we are doing the landing and he directed us to a room to his back-right side. There was practically no line in that room. The immigration officer asked some simple questions such as where are we flying from and which airline did we take and that was it. We did not receive a Canadian flag as people normally would receive at Rainbow/Peace Bridge, but whatever. The entire process took approximately 15 minutes and we were out of there with a stamped CoPR paper, which by the way, is THE PAPER that you'd better keep for life (You Old Age Pension eligibility counts on it).
The border agent also mentioned that we would be able to get an "R visa" in Canada if we want to travel outside of Canada before receiving a PR card, although I could not find any information about it. The only thing I could find at this point is a PRTD, which can only be applied for outside of Canada. If anyone knows about this "R visa", please kindly share.
All in all, I would highly recommend landing from Caribbean if landing from the US is not an option for you or you simply want to celebrate your PR with a nice little trip.
Faye
