(Cross-Post from the Outland - London UK forum)
WE LANDED! Docs are signed and passport is stamped! Tomorrow it is off to SNB/Service Canada for SIN and ID's and Medicare nonsense.
I thought I would give you all our landing story, since most people are not really landing in NB (mostly ON/BC) and this might be helpful to others in NB.
Our Landing Story:
We chose to go to 3rd Bridge, St. Stephen NB for our landing. We are in Fredericton (about 1hr45min away from St. Stephen) and I have the day off so it made for a nice drive. Hubby and I packed up my mother and took her with us, mostly for directions, and also because I am very non-confrontational and if something were to go wrong, I'd be sobbing in a corner unable to articulate anything to the CBSA official LOL.
We got to 3rd Bridge and drove over to the US side. We told the US border official that hubby was flagpoling. He asked if he'd ever done this before (for work visas, etc) and he hadn't, so we pulled over and went into the US border office. They gave us a declined form that we need to take back to CBSA on the other side of the bridge. I know this has been discussed in other threads, but I also asked if we ever decided to go to the US again, do we need to let the border agent know that hubby was declined this time. Border Agent said NO. Because we were just flagpoling, we did not need to declare this "rejection" moving forward.
US agent told us to go back to our car, swing around and drive back to Canada with the decline form. Got to the Canada border, told the rep we were landing, and she told us to pull over and go into the Border Services building. We went up to the desk and spoke with the MOST WONDERFUL CBSA Agent Mahar - what a delight! She was newer, but she was very thorough and did everything step-by-step while explaining what she was doing. Luckily things were straight forward for us (no B4 form, etc). We brought lots of additional docs (hubby's birth cert, marriage cert, proof of address, etc) but she didn't ask to see any of them. The only thing she did was take the form we got from the US Border and the yellow slip we got from the CBSA agent when we were in our car, as well as hubby's TRV extension because it was not affixed to his passport. She signed his 2 forms for COPR, gave us one of them back, and stamped/signed his passport. She took our CORRECT mailing address (because CIC has botched it about 3 times already) to make sure that the PR card comes to us. She also gave us a checklist on how to get a SIN, Medicare, Drivers License, etc.
Hope this will at least help a few people on their way with landing!