Hi Forum members,
Came to Canada for a short landing with my wife on 7th May 2015 at Toronto. A small brief of the landing procedures -
1. Completed immigration (second floor)- was asked 2 questions related to food that I was carrying and whether I had been to West Africa (related to the Ebola breakout). We had a few spices, walnuts, prunes etc in the checked in baggage, which we informed. We said that we had neither visited West Africa nor had been in contact with anyone from the place.
We were welcomed and advised to proceed to the new immigrant section.
2 As per advise of Qorax, we had prepared a set of documents separately for presentation to the officer when required.
a) POF:
We were asked about the amount of funds that we were carrying - we informed that we had cash of CAD 5000 and informed that we had recently transferred CAD 30,000 to our daughters account. (He did not ask to see either the cash or the transfer paper.) He asked us if we had any bank account in Canada, to which we said that we had applied for an HSBC account which was approved and we had to meet the bank officials to activate the account. No more questions were asked but the amount of CAD 30,000 was written by the officer on the COPR. (We are a 3 member family.)
Please note that I am not a joint account holder in my daughters account (which is in TD Canada Trust) - where I had deposited money from Dubai. I had applied to open a Canadian Bank Account in HSBC (I am a premier account holder in HSBC Dubai) but have not been able to operate the account since it has to be activated at the branch here in Canada.
b) Local address
He asked us for a local Canadian address and we provided a printed page of our daughters address. On our query, he informed that the PR card will take 6 weeks to be delivered. We offered him additional photos, which he refused saying that then photo on the COPR would suffice.
We were asked to wait and the wait took 15 mi. before we were called to meet the officer once again. We signed on the COPR (three locations), date and place of landing was recorded and we were welcomed to Canada One copy of the signed COPR was returned to us.
We asked him on the validity of the COPR and its requirement after the receipt of the PR Card (6 weeks delivery). We were strongly advised to keep the original COPR with us till time immemorial - as this original would be required to claim pension from the government.
3 When we exited from this section, another officer at the exit door gave us a warm welcome and along with the welcome gave us a set of brochures on "Welcome to Canada" and were asked to proceed to collect our luggage form the next level (first floor).
We collected our luggage and proceeded to the Customs. We presented the B4 and B4A form to the officer (we had prepared 2 sets of each document). The B4 form was blank while we had prefilled the B4A form along with photos (of jewellery) on A4 pages, and an approximate CAD amount. We also informed the officer about the goods to follow - laptops and a camera (at least 2 years old? - asked the officer). He then filled up the B4 form with the data that we gave him, took my signature on the B4 and the B4A forms, stamped each of the pages including the photos (in both sets), printed a receipt and gave us back one set.
We enquired on the procedure to bring in the jewellery into Canada since he had taken only my signature on the forms. We were informed that only the 3 of us, me my spouse or our daughter could bring the jewellery but the original stamped document should be presented on every occasion and they would strike off the article that had been imported.
4 After this, we took the elevator to the Ground Floor and came out of the airport.
We will now proceed to the Service Canada Office to complete the formalities of applying for the SIN Card.
We wish each and every member of this forum all success and we thank Aashifee, Qorax and MDV to have opened and have maintained this forum which has a huge wealth of information.
Thanking You
Rgds
Navneet
