Hi everyone,
Newbie here. I read about 150 pages and am going to continue reading but have a bit of an urgent problem with the military service requirement around the PRG certificate and humbly ask for your thoughts.
Some quick background info:
I met my partner while he was in Canada but his refugee status was rejected (shout-out to LeisaP and partner) and he had to back to Mexico. Hardest time of our lives. We decided this partnership was a “forever” deal and got married in the summer with the intention of pursuing spousal sponsorship.
Not wanting to risk failure due to human error on our part we scraped together all of our savings to hire an immigration lawyer to put together our application and act as our representative. We think we’re close to filing and have prepared a lot of stuff in advance, including all of the forms, tonnes of letters of support, proof of relationship and medical.
The problem:
We were told to apply for medical and BOTH police checks in advance to cut down on time when Citizenship and Immigration asks for them. (Wondering if this is a bad idea after reading posts here.) Medical was great, but we hit a snag with the police checks.
For the PGR certificate, as many of you know, you need to present a military service card. But my partner didn’t sign up for that when he was 18. In fact, you no longer need military service to get a passport and he went to Canada when he was 18.
From what I’ve gathered in this forum so far – please validate this – there is no penalty for signing up for military service later. But this obviously throws a wrench in our plans.
What we’re thinking of suggesting to our lawyer is we go ahead and submit the application with just the initial SSP certificate and wait for CIC to request the PRG certificate… buying some time for us to get the military service card prerequisite needed by PRG.
Has anyone else taken or heard of this approach? What do you do in the Background info form where it asks if you’ve done any military service? (Frankly surprised our lawyer didn’t bring this up when he approved of the form with “NONE” in that section, but I guess even experts can’t have all the answers.)
Now here’s the other question… I’ve heard you can “postpone” military service. Does anyone know if this can be postponed until after my partner returns to Canada and become a non-issue? If so, how?
Thanks a million for reviewing!!!