Many years ago, my wife and I had applied for her and the children, to come to Canada as Permanent Residents. For those that do not know, Canada does not have a Fiancee Visa like the United States has. We applied under the Family Class, since we were married, and thus qualified for this program. It's a pretty straight forward application. If I remember right, we spent half a day filling out the application. If you are ever in the position of wanting to sponsor your wife and kids, I would recommend doing it yourself, since it is pretty easy. The odd question can have a double meaning, but there is a guide book that you can refer to, and it gives a straight forward answer to what it is you need to answer. We spent quite a bit of time printing pictures, to show proof of relationship, dug out all receipts, plane ticket stubs, and anything else we could come up with to show time together, and proof that we were a legitimate couple. She got medicals done for her and the children, police record checks, documents done to show she had sole custody (this is important if there is no father in the pictures...otherwise, the father needs to give permission for his children to leave the country). We got everything put together, and sent it off to Canada. The first step in this process was to see if I qualified to be their sponsor. That didn't take too long...a couple months I think. Then, CIC (Citizenship and Immigration Canada) sent everything back to Manila, to the Visa office of the Canadian Embassy.
This process is where you need a lot of patience. The web page says it takes about a year to process (at least it did at the time), and they weren't kidding. But let me backtrack for a second. While preparing all of her documents, before we filled out the application, my wife had a spelling mistake in her birth certificate. Not an uncommon issue in the Philippines I learned. Not wanting her passport to share the same spelling mistake, she went through the process of fixing her birth certificate. This was a challenge. She needed to provide a copy of her Father's and Mother's birth certificates. Dad never had a birth certificate, and Mom's also had a spelling mistake.So she had to fly to another part of the country, to gather her fathers school and church records, and also get her mothers birth certificate corrected, before she could finally get her own corrected. Then she applied for, and got her passport with the correct spelling, her criminal record search, and everything else she needed.
So like I said, it takes about a year to process the visa application. One day, we get an email from the Visa Processing Centre in Manila saying that they could see there was a name change on her birth certificate (because of the misspelling I mentioned), and that CIC would require a new criminal record search done, with the old spelling. That wasn't a big deal, and before the day was done, she had the required document in hand. She scanned it, and sent it to them. And then, we waited. We knew we must be getting close, since we knew they had obviously been looking at her file. But nothing else seemed to be happening. I quit going to visit her when we started this visa process, because I didn't want to spend the money to go visit, get back to Canada, and discover that she was approved, and I needed to return there to go get them. So I waited. So we already waited a year prior to them asking for the updated criminal record search. 6 months later, she gets an email saying that they had requested this criminal record search, but since she hadn't provided it yet, her file would be closed in 1 month, because it would be assumed that she no longer wished to move to Canada. Panic set in for us. What went wrong? Did she send it to the wrong email address? Did she make a mistake in the subject line? (very important to get the subject line correct). We didn't want to start all over again...but who or how to get hold of someone to look in to this?
I was talking to my boss about this problem we were having, and he made the best suggestion. He told me to visit my local Member of Parliament's (MP) office. 2 days later, I was sitting at a desk in the office of my MP, and showing every correspondence between CIC, and my wife. Every email she sent to them, including the updated criminal record search, which also showed the date it was sent to them, and the subject line. The lady I was talking to told me that this office had a good working relationship with the Visa Office in Manila. I left everything with her, and went back to work. I think it was 3 days later, I got a call from her. She told me that they had ben talking to the Visa Office, and that the Visa Office didn't know what happened to her email from 6 months earlier, but were admitting the fault was theirs. I was told that so far, everything in our file was looking good, and we should be hearing something in about 2 weeks. Well, that was finally some positive news. And sure enough, 2 weeks later, my wife got an email requesting that she send in their passports to the Visa Office.That's how you know you have been approved. She didn't get a request for interview...just a request for passport. From there, it was only a matter of weeks before her and the kids moved to Canada. When I arrived in the Philippines to pick them up, her and I hadn't seen each other in person for a year and a half. But it was all over, and the future lay ahead. She has been with me here in Canada since 2017. It was a long wait...but it was worth the wait!
