If I were to marry my Canadian fiance whilst applying as common-law

[Keli76]

hi,
my fiance & I are going to send in our common-law sponsorship forms in soon, and I was wondering, what would we have to do if we were to marry while our application was being processed, would we have to re-apply, our would we have to notify them of our change in status ? send in yet more photos and proof of marriage (such as copy of certificate, witness statements etc)

if anybody has been through this, or knows to process please fill me in on the details

thanks
~K~

 

[RobsLuv]

You just notify them of the change in marital status and submit proof of your legal marriage - they change the classification and, frankly, it's easier to be approved as spouses as opposed to common-law partners because the requirements of each category within Family Class classification are different, so they assess the application on different grounds if you're a married couple as opposed to common-law partners. For example: proof of cohabitation is not required for spousal applications because a marriage is a relationship established in law where a common-law partnership is a relationship established by the fact that a couple has co-habitated for at least one continuous year.

You might want to read through the information in Section 5.51 of the OP2 Processing Manual about "switching categories between spouse, common-law, conjugal partners". That sort of explains how they do it.