Hi all,
Wondering if anyone can shed any light on this. I applied for my PR card renewal in March (to get ahead of the COVID situation). I just received by application back in the mail with a letter dated August 14th with a rejection reason:
"Your application is dated more than 90 days before being received by the IRCC and will require that you update your absences..."
I signed and mailed my application on March 16th 2020 and I have proof from the courier it was received by the IRCC on March 17th 2020. The application itself is stamped by PRC on March 18th 2020. I don't understand where the 90 days comes into it. If it is to do with the time between the application being received and them actually looking at it, everything has been delayed by COVID.
Thanks!
In the abstract it is difficult if not impossible to discern what or why this happened.
It is possible this was a mistake by a processing agent at IRCC. It is more likely there is some discrepancy in the information or dates populating the application form (transposed numbers in the application form date, or your accounting of travel dates, or such). You represent the latter is not the case, which would suggest a mistake at IRCC, which again is possible but not the more likely explanation.
There are some other *possibilities* but an attempt to explore those is a tangent likely to cause confusion or distraction, and not be helpful. Noting, however, you could pay for a consultation with a lawyer (free consultations are worth little more, if any more, than what you pay for, as in nothing), or outright hire a lawyer, to review the paperwork, and either explain things or help you to sort things out.
Not sure that would be a prudent expenditure of your time or money. After all, the fastest approach to handling this is to simply make a new application (not sure if you can do so based on the fees already paid or not; but paying the fee again would be far, far less expensive than going to a lawyer) with an updated accounting of your presence and absences.
Your date of landing is no longer relevant in assessing your compliance with the PR Residency Obligation. If, for example, you either made the new application today, or were otherwise examined for RO compliance today, the relevant five years is August 28, 2015 to August 28, 2020. From now on the relevant time period changes every day, and is based on the five years immediately preceding whatever the date is "today." (Thus, for example, even if the application resulted in issuing you a new PR card, the next time you are examined, which could be the next time you arrive at a PoE coming into Canada, your compliance with the RO would be based on the number of days you have been in Canada within the five years immediately preceding that day . . . having a new PR card has NO relevance if and when a PR is examined for RO compliance.)
Otherwise, yeah, Covid-19 has thrown a big wrench, and a lot of other junk, into the works, and we are likely to see more than a few strange twists and turns in the coming months or year. This is one of those years when *
stuff-happens* tends to be bigger and messier than usual
stuff-happens.
