I never thought I’d have to write a post about problems with renewing our work permit — I was sort of hoping last year’s story would be the end of it. But no, no such luck. This post is a continuation of the epic saga of our move to Canada. If anyone from Netflix is reading this — get in touch, I’m ready to sign a contract for the series!

A quick recap of what happened a year ago

A year ago, when we landed in Canada, the officer we ended up with refused to issue a work permit because D. had changed his last name. Even though he had every right to issue the permit without any problems, he dug in his heels, and for a month and a half we lived in Canada without any status. In the end, he did issue us a work permit, but not quite the way he was supposed to. He issued a temporary resident permit (TRP) and issued the work permit based on it. At the time we were happy — we had no idea how badly he’d actually set us up.

July 2021

On top of issuing us more documents than we wanted (or than he was supposed to), the officer issued the work permit for just one year. To be precise, he said a TRP can only be issued for a maximum of one year, so the work permit was issued for a year too — meaning it expires on January 10. With COVID, all government services work slowly, so we decided to apply for the work permit renewal super early — in July 2021. As always, our documents were checked and submitted online by our lawyer from the not-exactly-unknown firm Ernst & Young, which handles all of Microsoft’s employee relocation matters. After he submitted the application, we received a confirmation paper saying it had been accepted for processing. What happens when a work permit expires

Canada is actually pretty lenient about this. If you apply for a renewal before your current permit expires, then while they’re working on your case — even if the permit has expired — you can keep living and working in the country without any worries. You have that confirmation paper, and you can take it to various government offices to renew all kinds of documents, like health insurance. Technically, they’re not obligated to renew the insurance, but usually nobody makes a fuss, and they extend it by two months each time. Still, the decision about whether to renew our health insurance is up to whichever clerk happens to be serving us that day. The most unpleasant part: if you leave Canada, they won’t let you back in without a new work permit. So you can stay in the country, but you can’t leave. On average, work permit applications take three months to process. But four months had passed and nobody had written to us, while I had already started picturing a winter vacation in a warm country (I’m very tired, and the Caribbean is only a three-hour flight away!).

Late November 2021

The IRCC (immigration service) website actually lets you track the progress of case processing. We saw that they were already reviewing applications submitted in July, so we decided to remind our lawyer about ourselves. And… instead of the long-awaited work permit, we got a letter saying that IRCC had closed our case and required us to resubmit the application on paper, by mail.

When I read it, I, of course, burst into tears — how much longer can they keep tormenting us? And besides, what does “submit a paper application” even mean — do they not have a printer over there? Do they need help? I’d say we pay a big enough mountain of taxes for them to be able to buy themselves a printer. But it turned out to be not that simple. Sorting these questions out with the lawyer over the phone was simply impossible, so the next day, armed with the paper application and photos for the forms, we went to his office.

The whole thing turned out to be so dumb that it feels strange even writing about it. Let me share the list of facts our lawyer told us about — who, by the way, was furious about the situation.

  1. When the officer issued us a TRP last year, he played a really dirty trick on us. That status is given to people who, for whatever reason, don’t meet IRCC’s requirements to stay in the country. According to our lawyer, 95% of TRP holders have a criminal record. The other 5% are people who had some medical issues (you have to pass a medical exam to get a work permit or PR) and odd one-off cases like ours (we meet absolutely all the requirements — the officer just dug in his heels back then).
  2. When you apply online for a work permit renewal, all applications go to the IRCC office in Edmonton, and renewal applications land in the department with the least qualified (according to our lawyer) clerks, who process a mountain of similar applications. Processing this type of application is fairly trivial: they have their own internal rules they follow, and if anything falls outside those rules, they close the case and/or forward it to the departments with more experienced “special cases” clerks. In our application, they saw that we were TRP holders — they don’t deal with “complicated” cases like that — so they immediately (i.e., after almost five months!) closed the case and asked us to resubmit the documents on paper. Resubmitting on paper, as it turned out, means resubmitting your documents for review at the local offices (in our case, in Toronto). What that means and why it’s terrible, I’ll explain a bit further down.
  3. When submitting the application, our lawyer paid the TRP fee, even though we don’t need a TRP, and also attached an explanatory letter saying that we don’t need this status — we just need to renew the work permit, and the whole temporary residence story is simply a misunderstanding. He couldn’t skip paying the fee, because then the immigration service could simply reject the case for missing supporting documents, payment included.
  4. When the officer told us last year that this permit can only be issued for a maximum of one year, he was bending the truth. In reality, it can be issued for several years, BUT once upon a time there was a program where, if a person had held this permit for three years, they could automatically get permanent residency. To avoid such cases, border officers had guidance to issue TRPs for no more than a year (god forbid you make it easier for someone to get residency!). That program is long gone, but the instructions stayed.
  5. Border officers don’t report to the immigration service (surprising, by the way). But their job includes certain immigration matters, such as issuing work permits. If something goes wrong (as in our case), IRCC can’t really influence them (it didn’t work last year), and officers make decisions the way they think is right. Even if you take it to court, the court will side with the officer, because per the guidelines he was required to act “reasonably and within the law,” which is what he did.

Where we are now and what’s next

Now we’re required to send the documents on paper and launch a pointless bureaucratic process we should never have been caught up in to begin with! Paper cases can take anywhere from several months to a year — or to infinity. Since these are complicated cases, the processing time is correspondingly long. One of the reasons these cases are submitted on paper is that people with criminal records collect various letters from employers, friends, and so on, saying what good people they are and how much they’ve changed. The fact that we ended up in that same pile is so absurd that there are simply no words to describe my emotions about it.

Of course, the lawyers have their connections at IRCC, but you have to understand that here, “connections” doesn’t mean what it means in post-Soviet countries. A connection is simply the contact of a more senior person at IRCC you can call directly. The plan is for our lawyer to call this person and convince him/her to reopen our online case and just read it, at the very least. The Ernst & Young people are convinced that IRCC never read the case — they just saw the TRP and closed it without looking into it. If someone actually reads the case, most likely all the paper red tape will be cancelled and we’ll get our work permit. If not, we’ll have to wait endlessly until they get to our case in its paper form and, if everything’s OK, issue our documents.

What all this means

One of the problems with the documents now being submitted on paper is that we won’t have an official confirmation that we’re in the process of renewing our work permits (the one that’s automatically issued when you apply online). Our substitute for that paper will be a copy of the submitted application along with a cover letter from our lawyer. Officially, we can keep working — thanks for that, at least. Although I’ll need to give my HR team a heads-up and make sure they don’t have any problems with it.

What we can’t do:

  • Open new bank accounts or renew a credit card (life in North America isn’t much fun without one). We’ll need to talk to our bank and convince them to at least not close our accounts, because last year they told us the accounts would only work until our work permits expire.
  • Leave the country — this is what scares me the most. I can’t go on business trips or take a vacation, and I just hope that at least nothing happens to our families, so we don’t have to fly. Many immigrants are familiar with this situation — for example, if you’re waiting for a green card in the US (in some cases), or you’ve been granted Canadian PR but the cards haven’t arrived yet. But in those cases, there’s at least some point to the waiting; we’re just waiting for a work permit renewal, which in fact comes with no long-term perks whatsoever.
  • I can’t change jobs in this situation. Well, officially I can, of course, but I have no papers in hand that a new employer could hire me with (or it would be extremely complicated). The same goes for moving to a new apartment and so on. Even though we’re not planning to change any of these things right now, it’s still stressful to live in this situation. Especially since there’s no timeline. I barely survived these five months of waiting, and now they say it could stretch out for another year.
  • Also, our parents, for example, would most likely be refused a tourist visa because our status is unclear. At least, a friend’s mom was refused a visa when he applied toward the end of his work permit.

I still can’t believe that one person can mess up your life like this. Over the past couple of years, though, I’ve already encountered several people whose decisions turned my life upside down, and I still keep hoping for karma — which, sadly, doesn’t exist. If only we had walked up to a different officer when we landed, there would have been no problems at all (last year, another officer, when he learned about our situation, was sincerely surprised that we hadn’t simply been issued our documents right away). Or if people just did their jobs properly (for example, read the cases that come to them), life would be better too.

It’s also worth saying that in 99% of cases, if a woman had been in D.’s place (i.e., if a woman had changed her last name), no questions would have come up at all. Ernst & Young alone has had a sea of female clients in exactly this situation, and not one of them ever had any problems.

And finally, I’d like to point out that the Canadian government keeps broadcasting that the country needs more immigrants. But we’re already here, we both work, we pay plenty in taxes (enough to be appalled at the amounts), and they put us in this unpleasant position. Something doesn’t add up. Maybe Canada doesn’t really need high-skilled immigrants all that much — or maybe it just doesn’t need us.