Residency outside form
- Thread starter goldei
- Start date
If you checked yes, you should submit th form as per the help. I selected No although I left Canada.
At the risk of seeming picky, assuming this is in reference to item 9.c, the question is not about leaving Canada during the eligibility period but rather asks whether the applicant LIVED outside Canada during the eligibility period.
Of course many, many qualified applicants have lived outside Canada during the preceding five years, and thus the accurate answer to this item is "yes." But the vast majority of these applicants have no claim to Crown Service credit and form CIT 0177 is totally irrelevant.
My GUESS is that this item is NOT going to cause problems, that IRCC will get it and be flexible in working through the various ways applicants are likely to respond. It should be OK if the applicant:
-- answered "no" (even though the applicant did live outside Canada during the preceding five years), or
-- answered "yes" and did not submit CIT 0177 or an explanation
-- answered "yes" and submitted CIT 0177 with "NA" clearly written on it
-- answered "yes" and submitted an explanation that there is no Crown Service credit
-- answered "yes" and wrote "NA" across or next to the item
There is no consensus in the forum about the best answer. Many assert answering "no" is the best approach, despite that being contrary to fact. Personally, I usually disagree with any suggestion to answer contrary to the actual facts but in this situation recognize this should be OK (odds are that IRCC meant this item to apply only if Crown Service credit is relevant).
There is of course a risk that a "yes" answer and not including a CIT 0177 form, or at least an explanation why one is not submitted, may result in the application being returned. It is impossible to predict what the precise completeness check criteria is or how it will be applied. This is NOT a reason to worry much. Yes, it will result in the additional cost of shipping the application again and some delay in when the application will be "in-process." But that delay will not likely be much more than the initial batch of applications suffer anyway as IRCC struggles to deal with all the complications and confusion in the initial batch. In other words, applications delivered a couple months or a little more from now probably have a good chance of actually getting to the oath before many of the applications made this last week. (FIFO only works when the process is completely routine; given the way in which these changes were implemented, from problems getting even a printable/usable form online to issues like 9.c, obviously IRCC is not at all likely to handle the initial batch of applications routinely. Many if not most will likely encounter delays if not outright non-routine processing side trips resulting in significant delays.)
In any event, the cake-is-in-the-oven, nothing to do but wait and see how this goes. Odds are good it will be OK.