Our Canadian Immigration Story (II)

By: Dave Lympany

We managed to spend two weeks at Andie's sisters in Calgary during October 2001, fitting in quad biking, hiking, trips to Banff, and also viewing show homes. We were getting a feel for southern Alberta and its opportunities. On our way home the airline (Canada 3000) went bankrupt as we flew into Gatwick on it – another bad sign for my future employment.

With the police checks complete, we sent the application off to Kerry, who returned professionally presented paperwork with supporting documents for us to sign and return with the High Commission fees. The new Canadian Immigration system was finally announced with stricter point scoring that was back dated to all applications received after December 18th 2001.

Ours had arrived there on 19th December!!!! We wouldn’t qualify under the new rules; Kerry reassured us that as the new system hadn’t been ratified by parliament it wasn’t set in stone. The authorities backed down after threats of legal action by several Canadian Immigration Lawyers, the cutoff date was set as June 1st 2002. All applications processed before then would be under the old rules – we were back in with a chance. In Feb. 2002 our file number arrived – we were being processed; we waited to see if we were to be called for an interview, accepted or declined.

The wait was crazy – Kerry kept us busy with regular information mailings on Canada, the reassuring voice on the end of the phone was worth the fee in itself. Andie’s sister was also busy in Calgary phoning around to establish points of contact for me. I had started to look at other employment and began some project management courses. As with my aircraft maintenance licenses I soon realized that UK qualifications wouldn’t readily move to the Canadian system. I contacted the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) and found they had an impressive curriculum of courses including several Project Management offerings and some great technical pre-employment courses that had a good history of the candidates finding employment in the field of choice.

The call came out of the blue: we had been accepted subject to Medicals and were not being called for an interview! The nearest approved clinic was in Oxford, Andie phoned immediately, the first appointment was eight weeks. We put the house on the market – we needed to know it was sold before we could plan on moving. If we failed the medicals we decided I would still leave the RAF and we would move away from the area. Andie’s parents would let us stay with them if we sold the house. We put the house on the market at the end of June 2002 – and had a buyer in 3 days.

The date of sale was set for the 31st August and we would move out on the 29th. We couldn’t believe our luck, but it wasn’t to be all plain sailing! The clinic phoned first, they had double booked us and we’d have to wait an extra two months. Andie had “a bit of a chat” with them and they finally agreed to squeeze us in as an extra appointment after a heated debate!

All 4 of us had to have medicals – the kids didn’t have x-rays or blood tests but we each had 40 minutes with the doctor, hearing and blood pressure tests. Even though there were no health issues as far as we knew I managed to stress about the whole deal and ended up failing the blood pressure test.