I think I've figured out what the problem is: crappy communication. If CIC would just tell us exactly what's going on at any given time, much of this stress and... bad-will, i guess, could be completely avoided.
Anyways - ecas is changed today to Decision Made, and as I understand it, that usually means good things - they sent a letter on Feb 7th. We were just waiting on criminal checks, and since there's definitely no problem there, well... it's probably a good decision!
The first line is in reference to our own anxiety (and others', based on this board). Looking back, CIC processed this application in a year plus two days, and their time-frame when we submitted it was 11-12 months. There was a processing error to start off with, and it took us almost a month to submit some documents they requested later on. The AIP took almost months from start to finish, 4 months longer than "normal" at the time, but then it was wham-bam work permit, health card, license, Decision made - 3 months.
So all in all, from Received to Decision made in one year and two days - discounting for the time it took us to get the proper documents, that's right at the short end of the quoted timeframe - not too bad!
But it WAS bad. All the clueless waiting, the ecas logins that showed no updates and the calls to agents who, although sometimes empathetic, friendly and helpful, usually can't provide (or aren't permitted to provide, maybe... I don't know) any case-specific information, and are therefore rendered practically useless.
I guess what I'm saying is that for us, it wasn't the waiting time that was the killer - in the end, that was right on the money. It's the lack of information that creates much of the stress involved in this whole process, I mean, if you know that there
isn't some weird technicality or departmental delay or lost forms or who-knows-what holding up the processing of your application, you'd certainly feel a lot more at ease over the waiting period, right? We sure would've.
Anyways - DECISION MADE!!! Let's hope it's a good one
Are we the first in February?
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