Hey fellow outland sponsors/applicants. My wife had been posting here but given how much busier we are prepping for baby I'll put in our timeline + update:
Application was sent May 27th, Received May 30th, sponsorship approval was July 5th, Buffalo received July 14th and that's where we are now waiting with what looks like a lot of you on a stalled Buffalo.
And a quick story. I'm a US citizen, been in Canada with my wife since April. She's in her 39th week of pregnancy. We decided to file outland due to the supposedly faster nature of being able to work/get OHIP. My 6 month stay was going to be up in early October which is only 1-2 weeks past baby's due date.
We initially were going to go inland for visitor extension rather than just attempt re-entry, however, since the border officer only scanned my passport in April and gave no stamp I had no proof of entry that the CIC would accept, therefore missing an essential part of the visitor extension app, I decided in desperation to call Peace Bridge and talk to an immigration officer at the point of entry. Not only was he nice about it, but he told me to use him as a reference, after I told him that I had everything ready for a visitor extension from a guarantor's letter to sponsorship approval letter from the CIC, extra proof of funds and support, and my wife went to Fort Erie with me. So sure enough a few days ago went down there with the stuff I had, went to the re-entry lane, and on the advice of the officer asked them for a visitor record, so went inside, explained the situation, they pulled the officer in who told me to reference his name, and on his advice they basically gave me a one year extension visitor record, stapled it in my passport, explained to me that if I needed to visit my dying grandmother in Georgia, US, I could use the VR for re-entry, and if the application somehow took longer than a year I could come back to them provided similar conditions and they'd give me another year.
Sufficed to say they are much more reasonable than officers at the US points of entry when dealing with my wife when she came to visit.
