Research Trip September / October 2006 - Landing

The whole landing process was very straightforward (fortunately). We landed at Calgary and by the time we had got ourselves organized with the kids, the buggy (stroller) and everything there was no queue (line-up) at passport control. We told the lady we were landing as immigrants and she checked our passports and directed us to the immigration area.

The immigration area had about 5 or 6 ‘booths’ with an officer in each one talking to someone. We were second in the queue and waited about 5 minutes to be called up. The officer went through the paperwork for each of us in turn, Karen first as she was the principle applicant it took between 5 & 10 minutes for each of us. He asked us a few questions and confirmed the details on the forms.

A couple of things to note. I asked the officer if all the people were landing as permanent residents. He said that most of them would be processing visitors or temporary work visas. The other thing was that while we had up to date pictures of the boys for the paperwork the passport ones were over a year old, taken when they were only 6 weeks old. You can imagine how different the boys are by now. The officer managed to identify which boy was which. So you can see the training they have regarding checking passport pictures pays off.  He told us that our permanent residents cards would be sent to us in 30 – 60 days (we gave my sister’s address). When we left this area we noticed that there was quite a queue of people waiting behind us so it looked as though we timed it well.

After this we went through to the baggage hall. Ours was the only luggage left on the carousel. We took all this over to the customs officer with our landing card from the flight and told them we were landing as permanent residents. She checked our landing card and then directed us to another area. After a wait of about 15 minutes we were called over by one of the customs officers. We explained we were landing and presented him with our Goods to Follow list which he took a copy of. We confirmed the total value in Canadian Dollars and he filled a form in and placed a label with a bar-code on each sheet. He also stressed that we need to keep hold of this as this would be needed when our goods arrived.

That really was it – it seemed quite an anti-climax actually after all the waiting for this step. Maybe this was because we had had a pretty long day at this stage. But certainly that was it we're are now permanent residents of the country of our choice – Canada.

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