Finally A Canadian Citizen

Charlotte finally has her Canadian citizenship. Hooray!!!!!

I won’t make a long story longer, but I thought I should tell this tale in case there are others out there having troubles.

Here is our story.
We sent in all the materials, and then like everyone else we waited patiently. About 3 months later, we got a notice to send in Charlotte’s permanent resident card. I was REALLY hesitant about doing this, as you can imagine. After checking with a bunch of other parents, however, I was assured that this was the final step in the process (good news!) and it was fine to mail the card to the good folks at Citizenship and Immigration. So I did this, with the understanding that in approximately 3-4 weeks, if our timing was similar to others, Charlotte would get her citizenship notice. So we waited, and we waited, and we waited, and then I am almost embarrassed to say that we forgot about it. Finally in March it occurred to us, “Hey, why the heck don’t we have Charlotte’s citizenship yet?????”

So we went onto the website - a pretty good tool actually – and checked on the status. Much to our surprise, it said “Congratulations. Citizenship was granted on January 22, 2007.” What the……? Was anyone going to tell us this?? Why didn’t we get anything in the mail? As we read more carefully, we noted that it said that her documents were mailed out on January 25, 2007. ‘Uh oh’, as Char would say. Where the heck were those docs? Visions of identity theft started to float in our heads.

So then we were plunged into the evil world of automated attendants and geographically remote call centers. One tip for people who need to call the citizenship folks: their office hours are 8:00 to 4:00. Now, what they don’t tell you is that it appears to be local time, and the call center is in Nova Scotia I think. If you are calling from Ontario – call them at 7:00 am (when no one else thinks they are open) and you will have no trouble getting through. Don’t ask how many calls it took me to figure this out…I get pissed off thinking about all that wasted time on hold……

ANYWAY, when finally got through we were told this little gem of a story: Apparently we didn’t get our docs in the mail because we were “randomly selected as part of the quality assurance process,” and thus in order to get Charlotte’s citizenship card, we had to make an appointment with a real person in a real office to produce real, original copies of all our back-up documentation for them to verify.

OK, well, I can see the merit in making sure everything is kosher, but here are my issues.
#1 WAS ANYONE GOING TO TELL US THIS???? Why did we have to figure it out on our own?
#2 You are not allowed to call the local paper verification people directly. The call center people send them a message and then they “will contact you in 4-6 weeks.” “Oh, and ma’am, if they don’t call you in that time, call the call center back to follow up.” WHAT? You randomly selected me and now you’re going to leave me hanging??”
#3 If you get pushy about not being able to call, the call center people will give you a fax number so you can take more of your time and type/fax a letter explaining your situation and beg for an appointment
#4 I suspect that the whole ‘randomly selected’ thing is actually b.s. Really what happened when we called was this: upon realizing that valuable documents had been lost in the mail, it suddenly became our problem to prove that we were who we said we were. Why the heck don’t they send this stuff via registered mail, courier, or some other method that is traceable????

ANYWAY, so I wrote and faxed the letter, and I got an appointment, which was on our moving day. Crap. So I called again and was advised to write/fax another letter requesting a change. OK (aka CRAP again!) Wrote/faxed that letter and then someone actually called me back. A real, live person called Pauline. Pauline told us that we didn’t really need an appointment; we could show up any morning around 9:00 am. HRUMPH.

Steve got to have the in-person fun. Of course he got there early and had to sit in the car for 1 hour. And of course one of our docs didn’t have exactly the right number on it (we have 3 notarized copies, and they all have unique numbers. Who knew?), so he got to go back another day. But that day finally ended well!

Here is Canada’s newest citizen.

He, he, he. And here are some photos of her looking not quite as funky.