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dbear767

Member
May 29, 2011
16
0
My wife and I have been married for 4 years, live in Colombia, and we have decided to move to Canada. I am Canadian and she is Colombian.

We submitted our application in July, 2011 and I was approved as a sponsor on Sept 09, 2011.

From that point until January 20,2012 we heard nothing.

On January 20th we received a call from the Bogota VO, asking why we had not complied with the letter they sent me in October.

I gave them a Canadian mailing address as we are in Canada regularly, looking after my 95 year old Mom. They mailed a letter to Canada!!!!

The last time we sent a letter from Colombia to Canada, the letter took 10 months!!!!

Anyway, the agent understood that we had not received the letter, and agreed to send another to us in Colombia.

We got the package today, and it contains a checklist of documents to submit within 60 days. Medical, local processing fee, notarized copy of marriage certificate, proof of payment of the Right of permanent residence fee, passport, Colombian Criminal record check, and the FBI criminal record check (my wife studied in the USA for one year)

I looked at the CIC site, and saw it takes between 16 and 18 weeks to get this record check.

This brings me to my question 1:

Will the VO extend the 60 days limit to provide the requested documents?

Question 2.

They are asking for my wife's passport. We are now 6 months into this process, and the normal time for receiving a PR in Bogota is 17 months. Is my wife to be unable to travel for the next year while they have her passport?

I will call the VO office tomorrow, but I thought I should check on this site for some advice.


Thank you for your time. :)
 
1. Apply for the FBI check, then advise Bogota you have done so and the process is expected to take 12-18 weeks and you are requesting an extension until you receive the results (send them a copy of the airway bill you use to send the fingerprints to the FBI).

2. If they are asking for her passport, that means they are ready to finalize the application, actually. Remember the times are average for 80% of applications, but some may be finished much sooner than the average time for most of the applications. There used to be a breakout that showed 20%, 50% and 80% of applications timelines, but they stopped publishing those.