Missed Citizenship Test

[Andries]

Hello all the wise people on the forum. I need help/advice with the following:

We are Permanent Residents and already applied for our citizenship. CIC sent us letters when and where to write our citizen test, but we never received the letters although CIC has our correct mailing address. The only reason we know about the test is that by coincidence I checked our status on the citizenship application on the CIC website and then learned that a letter was sent to us to write the tests.

I called the call center and the agent told me not to worry as whoever is in charge of the citizenship test department will automatically re-schedule the test. I also made sure with him that they have our correct address. I asked him if I can contact them to re-schedule myself, but he said no, they will contact me.

In the meantime my mother got seriously ill and we had to leave Canada to be with her and our family. My Mom is still in a coma and we are not sure when we will be able to return to Canada. I contacted CIC through the online case specific email and told them that we are out of Canada, the reason why we left and what happened with the citizenship test. I have not heard back from them but did see on the online status that they have changed our address to the temporary address in Namibia, Africa. I do not think they have notified the agent in charge at the citizenship test department because I saw a second note on the the online status for a new date for the tests.

1. How can I call this specific department from outside of Canada? From here we cannot dial any toll-free numbers, it has to be a normal landline.
2. Also we need to renew our PR cards as they will expire in February 2016 and I think we will still be in Africa at that time. Any advice how we can do it from outside of Canada?

Your help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[Leon]

Immigration kind of has the idea that your citizenship test should be so important to you that you should drop everything in order to take it so you can not know when you will be rescheduled and these people are very hard to get a hold of and they are not very flexible about catering to your needs. Their mindset seems to be that if you want to be Canadian, it should be the most important thing in your life.

The system is not set up for you to renew your PR card from outside Canada. If you are outside Canada but still meet the residency obligation, you can apply for a travel document at a Canadian embassy, use that to travel to Canada and then apply to renew your PR card. A PR card application must originate from within Canada. There is however a loophole somewhere stating that your PR card application can not be refused simply because you are outside Canada so what some have done is either travel to Canada to mail the application in and then go back or mail the application to Canadian friends and have them mail it in for you. I know of PR card applications having been refused because they were mailed from outside Canada.

Now, for the followup, in many cases, CIC mails PR card renewals to the Canadian address that you give them. However, as they know you are not in Canada, they will most likely request that you come to Canada and pick your PR cards up at a local office. It is also possible that they now suspect that you are planning on moving outside Canada as soon as you get your citizenship or even that you already have. This might trigger an RQ for your citizenship application as well as a delay on your PR card renewal.