Outland Quebec Sponsor Moving to another Province

[CitizenSoon]

My friend, a Canadian citizen living in Montreal, travelled to back home and got married. He submitted a sponsorship application 18 months ago. He is now considering moving to another province because the processing times outside of Quebec are much less.

His inquiries:
1- After how many months can he expect the application to be finalized?

2- What steps does he need to take to move his file from Quebec to another province?

3- Are there any specific risks or concerns he should keep in mind during this process?

4- Does the 18-month period he has already waited count toward the total processing time?

 

[canuck78]

My friend, a Canadian citizen living in Montreal, travelled to back home and got married. He submitted a sponsorship application 18 months ago. He is now considering moving to another province because the processing times outside of Quebec are much less.

His inquiries:
1- After how many months can he expect the application to be finalized?

2- What steps does he need to take to move his file from Quebec to another province?

3- Are there any specific risks or concerns he should keep in mind during this process?

4- Does the 18-month period he has already waited count toward the total processing time?

1. Dependent on many things but on average processing times should be less than in Quebec.

2. He should move to another province and establish a life there like find a job outside Quebec and leave his Quebec job. Secure housing and live in that housing outside of Quebec. If he owns a home for example in Quebec that would make things more complicated. He should then secure things like a health card, driver’s license or other form of documentation, register and insure a car if he owns one outside in the new province, etc. He would then inform IRCC of his change of address and include proof that he has left his life in Quebec and established a permanent life outside Quebec.

3. Not if he has truly left Quebec and has no immediate plans of returning. Of course there are risks associated with uprooting your life and starting a life in another location. The cost of living can be much higher in some locations and leaving a job these days without securing another one is very risky. You would also be losing any form of seniority if you changed jobs which would be taking a risk these days given all the layoffs happening and the tough job market.

4. Yes and no. You wouldn’t have to start processing from scratch but you wouldn’t be given credit for the full 18 months of processing that had already happened. It’s unclear how much processing time you get credit for but spousal sponsorship for most outside Quebec doesn’t take years.

 

[armoured]

My friend, a Canadian citizen living in Montreal, travelled to back home and got married. He submitted a sponsorship application 18 months ago. He is now considering moving to another province because the processing times outside of Quebec are much less.

His inquiries:
1- After how many months can he expect the application to be finalized?
....
4- Does the 18-month period he has already waited count toward the total processing time?

I agree overall with @canuck78 on this. Truth is, the specific issues (the Quebec delays) and people having to deal with it/trying to deal with it is relatively recent so there's simply not enough information or reported experiences here to be able to give you useful info. "Probably faster than staying in Quebec" is as good as anyone can say, really. And no way to know if that's an acceptable trade-off for the individual. (And hey - there's going to be an election in Quebec, sometime this year, I think - will that change anything? No idea)

There's no 'count' for the months being processed. Probably won't be 'starting over' at least in sense that AOR is done and some other relatively automatic clearance stuff IRCC does (criminal background checks through databases, for example).

But where in the process it gets re-inserted, that's anyone's guess. Probably right now so few cases it's more or less manual to 'switch' and that means could be anything at all.