HORRAY!!! WE GOT THE PASSPORT AND VISA BY POST TODAY!
My hubby and I want to write a little detailed blurb about our process, we hope it will be helpful. This process is so stressful and it feels like you are running though a maze in the dark. Everyone's process as I am sure is different, here was ours:
We applied at the end of July, got approval for sponsorship at the beginning of September. The file was sent to ND office and within 4 or 5 days they asked for his passport. We were pretty excited and kinda expected to see him in Canada for Christmas.... But time passed and we heard nothing. Our case was pretty simple, we had lots of photos of our time together and of the wedding, my Mom and friend attended our wedding in India which was a nice celebreation
We had tones of emails, chat history (skype) and phone records. We are genuinely a loving married couple!
By December we got a letter from CIC-ND asking for information about my husbands work in Russia, he was there teaching Yoga for a year. We supplied his work contracts, address, articles he was featured in as a Yoga instructor etc.. again (as we supplied most of this info in our initial application) Plus they had his passport with his visa from Russia. He was trained as a Yoga teacher with lots of certificates, so there should not have been any doubt about his work.
Mid- January, i contacted my local MP to get an enquiry. She got notice in about a day saying they hadn't yet received this information. This stressed us out ALOT. She told me that they probably had it sitting in the mailroom and would get to it soon. If we didn't hear anything from them in a month contact her again...
I was sure they must have had the letter, because when I checked the ECAS status, they had changed his address to his home address. Prior to that we had our Lawyers address as the contact address for him, as that was what the lawyer recommended.
I came back to India to be with my hubby, cause we really missed each other and we were going crazy, this process including gathering all the information had taken over 8 months by this point and we were tired of it. We just want to be together. I contacted the MP again Mid-Feb and she told me that for some reason they had sent the letter again asking for his Russian info at the end of Jan... We knew they had the information because of the address change on ECAS... The MP was also confused... I had sent her proof of mailing the letter, and all the information they were asking for. She went to CIC- Ottawa and directly got a response.... HE WAS ISSUED THE VISA!!!
After we received this happy news, we finally got the letter that CIC-ND wrote on the 31st of Jan but wasn't actually sent until the 14th of FEB. We didn't have the pp and visa in hand so we were a little confused... Luckily, today we got the pp and visa... They sent it by registered post and it only took a couple of days to reach us here in south india. We are really very happy, now we can travel back to Canada together.
So hopefully, that make sense... The process is complicated but we know now that if your relationship is true and genuine, you can provide a lot of good supporting evidence (ie. in our initial we also submitted letters from our friends and family showing support and knowledge of our relationship)... It will all work out!
All the best of luck to everyone with good intentions!
