My application is approved and we have our passports stamped as of Aug 30 2019.
Our COPR expiry date is 10/Feb/2020 whereas we had done our medicals on 30/Jan/2019. We have got an additional grace time of 10 days to land in Canada.
Wanted to share our journey so far and hope it might be useful for some of you.
We are a family of 3 and never expected we would get our Canadian Visa. Just submitted everything to God and applied ourselves.
We had initially thought of migrating in 2012, but my spouse was hesitant as he did not want to leave India and our loved ones. We never thought of this dream until mid-2017 when my friend migrated to Canada and she threw the spark in us again. We then decided we will give it a chance of either migrating to Australia or Canada and we finally zeroed down to Canada.
We started slowly, visited 2 Immigration consultants, googled and found this Forum which was of immense help to us. Though we were silent members in the forum, we read and understood a lot of things.
We both applied for ECA with WES in the month of June 2018 and got the evaluation done by November 2018. I had a lot of struggle in getting the ECA done as WES had changed the format and wanted the university to acknowledge back. Earlier I guess this was random. After a lot of follow up with the university this got completed. The ECA for my spouse never got done due to some name mismatch errors and was rejected after waiting for almost 4 months. We never bothered to do his ECA again and we completed our IELTS and entered the pool on Nov 21 2018.
We got ITA on Dec 19 and submitted the documents on Feb 6th. We were reluctant in submitting the documents as we could not obtain the work reference letter in the IRCC required format. We also paid the RPRF fees upfront and waited patiently.
We used to check our online account very rarely. We just called up once on June 15th and the agent did not disclose anything much. Hence, we ordered GCMS and got the same by July 19th. We saw that Eligibility was marked as review required, and nothing had started by then. We were really sad and upset though we were aware that we haven’t submitted the required work experience documents.
As I mentioned above, my organization was not willing to provide any reference letters. I just submitted a non-notarized letter from my colleague working in the same grade, six month’s salary slip and a promotion letter and a scan copy of our employee ID Card. Though I had more than 23K CAD in my account this was also marked for review for our surprise and I had shown my PF and FD as the source. PF is maintained by my Organization itself and also the FD got matured in May 2019. This might have been the reason but nothing was mentioned as such.
We submitted a new letter from the bank stating the FD is renewed and can be liquidated at any point of time and new PF statement in a weeks’ time. We did not submit anything related to my work experience again as we had no other proofs to substantiate my roles and responsibilities.
We were mentally prepared for a rejection; but to our shock and disbelief we got the golden mail on August 16th. I haven't seen any ghost updates in my profile or might have missed as I am not regular in checking our profile. We submitted our passports on August 21 and got the online update in CIC portal on August 30th as status approved and also a mail that the passport is ready for collection from VFS.
This phase was a mix of emotions, and finally we are relieved now. Never ever thought our application will get approved and we will reach this far.
Now the big journey starts and we are really excited and more of tensed about our life in Canada will be.
We sincerely hope everyone here gets their PR soon and wish everyone all the best. Thank you all for the support in this Forum.
NB: I wouldn’t recommend to submit a non-notarized reference letter as I have seen our seniors here saying it is better to have it notarized in case one is unable to get the experience letter in the IRCC standard format.
All the very best!