Yes, my husband got an exemption. The circumstances were that he worked in Kuwait before the war for a few years and all of the police records were destroyed in the war - so it was impossible to get a PCC because they had no record of him ever having been there.
We provided the following evidence to get the exemption:
- email exchanges with the Kuwait embassy / consulate in Canada confirming the PCC could not be obtained
- email exchanges with the Kuwait embassy / consulate in the US (my husband is originally American)
- email exchanges with the Canadian and US embassies / consulates in Kuwait
- print outs from a US government website stating that it's impossible to get a PCC for Kuwait for the period my husband was there
- LOE summarizing everything we tried to do to get the PCC with a list of the evidence we were providing and a statement by my husband that he had a clean record while he was there. Also evidence that he was there under a US government contract and that he would have been immediately sent home should there have been any issue.