three burning issues

[toby]

There are three issues here:

1) Dating photos that don't show the date on the front.

I need to show Immigration that I made four trips to my wife's country. I have passport stamps to show the trips, but also want to link photos to the correct trip.

The problem is, some photos taken by others don't show the date taken on the front. If I sent the photos by email or disk, the IO could open the photo and check properties to see the date the photo was taken. But Immigration doesn't want disks or emails.

So, my idea is to write the dates on the front of the photo printout, and invite the IO to ask me to email any photo for date verification.  AT least they'll know that I am prepared to verify the date taken.

2) I am providing copies of my passport pages to show the dates I entered my wife's country and the dates exited. But a simple copy of the passport page doesn't identify it as being from my passport.

My idea was to have the page copies notarized as a true copies from my passport, even if Immigration does not mention the need to notarize copies.  Anyone have different views?

3) Why won't Mississauga send notification of case number by email instead of mail? I am a long way away in China.

Thanks

Toby

[mitamata]

1.) I think you stress too much about this one. None of our photos had a date on them and they were all printed from a photo studio about a month before I sent everything, so the only date there was the date it was printed. Heh. I wrote the date for when it was taken on the back of each photo - for most (except for wedding pictures), I didn't know the exact date and just wrote the month and year. And it was good enough.

2.) I didn't bother with that, I just included regular copies. If you have any boarding passes saved, those would probably help too.

3.) Because that's just not how they do it I'm afraid.
For Mississauga, there's nothing to worry about. You can log in to e-cas and you will see when they will begin processing the application. When a decision is made, you will see that. You can then call the call center and they will tell you if you were approved or not.
http://immipedia.ca/CIC_call_centre
They can't give you any information after the application is forwarded to the visa office though.

[ariell]

I did the same as mitamata for the photos and  passport photocopies and we were approved with no issues. I also had paid for all my flights online so had copies of the flight itineraries and boarding passes which I submitted with our application. Sure you could always go and get the photocopies notarized but I personally don't think that is money well spent.

They probably don't send notification by email because email is not a secure form of communication and it would be very easy for emails to end up in someone's spam folder and you would never get the message!