Hi everyone,
Long time follower and infrequent poster on this thread though maybe this long post will make up for that!
This forum has been a great resource and reassurance during this process. Much more helpful than calling CIC. My husband, a US citizen, landed as a permanent resident last Friday and I wanted to share his rather difficult landing experience.
Our timeline took just over 9 months.
VO: Ottawa
Destination: Toronto
App Filed: Feb. 18th 2015
AOR 1: April 10th
SA: April 16th
AOR 2: April 21st (received over the phone)
In process in ECAS: August 21st
Medicals: submitted up front but expired, requested by CIC on September 9th and resubmitted September 17th
Additional docs requested and sent: October 21st
Decision made in ECAS: October 31st
COPR received: November 9th
Landed: November 20th
He did his landing early Friday morning at the Peace Bridge land border crossing in Buffalo. CBSA staff were quick and friendly in processing him but unfortunately quite incompetent as we would later learn.
When we went to a Service Canada location in Toronto later that same day to apply for his SIN card, we were told that they couldn’t give him one because there was a discrepancy between his COPR and his passport – turns out the immigration agent that morning wrote down my husband's travel document number incorrectly when copying it from the COPR into his passport, mixing up two numbers AND forgot to sign my husband’s copy of the COPR. Service Canada told us to go to the nearest border crossing and get immigration officials there to correct the mistake. Since Buffalo is about 2 hours from Toronto, we rushed over to Terminal 1 at Toronto Pearson Int’l Airport (turns out you can just walk in to immigration from the arrivals section of the terminal) and were told by the first CBSA agent there that they couldn’t do anything about it – that we’d have to go BACK to the Peace Bridge border in Buffalo, get the agent who made the original mistake to cross out their error, correct it and sign it. That we’d have to call the Peace Bridge and make an appointment to go see the original agent when they were back on their shift god-knows-when. For a mistake that was not our fault. That was incredibly frustrating and disheartening, not to mention horrible customer service.
After a few minutes of polite and pleading persuasion, we convinced the CBSA agent to talk to his supervisor, who corrected the error in my husband’s passport, signed his COPR thus making it official, entered a note into his record in their system that that had been done, and had his SIN card processed at the Service Canada desk within immigration at Pearson. The staff there told us that unfortunately these kinds of mistakes happen quite frequently at the land border crossings because they don’t get the volume of landings for agents to know what to do very well. And that the airport always gets these kinds of mistakes coming to them – which didn’t make any sense why we were first told to go back to the land border to correct the error, but we were tired and grateful the mistake was fixed and we weren’t going to push it any further with the CBSA.
My recommendation for US outland applicants: do your landing at Pearson or at other major international airports in Canada where they have the trained staff to handle immigration matters, have the volume of immigrants passing through to actually put that training into use frequently and so possibly might have a lower frequency of errors and have the staff to fix problems when they occur. If you land at Pearson Int’l Airport, you can also get your SIN card processed at the same time rather than having to go visit a Service Canada location to do so – not sure if this happens at other airports as well.
Essentially, my husband landed twice that day – once at the land border and then again for real at Pearson a few hours later. Unbelievable!
Wishing everyone here a speedy DM and a less stressful landing experience!
