Is PO Box fine for receiving PR Card and for banking?

[radicalprotnns]

Hi everyone, I will be landing in Toronto next week. This decision is a bit sudden since I recently got a job offer and thus I have to travel soon. I have yet to sort out temporary housing. I will deal with long-term housing once I land.

It is hard for me to find a reasonably-priced airbnb for 3 or 6 months. As I anticipate that I'll be moving around for the first few months, can I get a PO Box and have my mail sent there? In particular, can I have my PR Card mailed to a PO Box and can I have my debit card (from the bank) mailed there too?

I appreciate any tips and advice. Thanks so much!

 

[armoured]

I believe it won't work for pr card, don't know about banks. They want street addresses. Most common is to use friends or family.

 

[steaky]

Some banks let you pick up your cards from the branch.

 

[Kaibigan]

For years, my principal residence has been off-grid and there are no street addresses or any such thing. Those who live there all have P.O. box addresses only and our mail comes in by floatplane. I have received credit cards and things like that at my P.O. Box for years, no problem.

The only problem is with BC and Canadian government. They have scant understanding of the fact that Canada is a big country and not everyone lives in cities with civic addresses and such niceties. For any government correspondence, they insist on a civic address. We deal with that by simply inventing one. Something like #1 Main Street, followed by post box location, works fine. In my case, the people who operate the post office there for a few hours a week know everyone and once they see a name, they know the correct P.O. Box.

I also have a residence on an island that is on the grid, an island with some civic addresses. But some, like me, have no civic address there. There, the post office operates on regular business hours and not always the same person on duty, so I can't be sure that, if they see my name, they know my box number. In that case, what seems to work is, again, an invented street address, followed by the correct box number. So an address like this will work: John Doe, #1 Main St., Box 100, Remote Island, B.C. Even my U.S. bank will send cards to either address. Canadian credit unions and banks will accept both.

I cannot say about PR card, but I would guess that a made-up street address, plus box number, should work.

 

[Cassiano]

Hi everyone, I will be landing in Toronto next week. This decision is a bit sudden since I recently got a job offer and thus I have to travel soon. I have yet to sort out temporary housing. I will deal with long-term housing once I land.

It is hard for me to find a reasonably-priced airbnb for 3 or 6 months. As I anticipate that I'll be moving around for the first few months, can I get a PO Box and have my mail sent there? In particular, can I have my PR Card mailed to a PO Box and can I have my debit card (from the bank) mailed there too?

I appreciate any tips and advice. Thanks so much!

renounce and do not come bacck

 

[armoured]

For years, my principal residence has been off-grid and there are no street addresses or any such thing. Those who live there all have P.O. box addresses only and our mail comes in by floatplane. I have received credit cards and things like that at my P.O. Box for years, no problem.

My understanding is/has been that government (IRCC?) are supposed to know the difference between communities that have only post office box, vs 'rented' post office boxes. Of course theory and reality often differ.

A related thing has been going on all across Canada (to my understanding), but certainly in Ontario, is that the 'governments' (all levels) are working on and actually implementing standards about giving each individual dwelling (and commercial locations, I assume) physical street addresses, and wherever possible, getting rid of the names that were highly ambiguous/duplicative. This doesn't preclude the post office still physically delivering to centralized post boxes (either in a post office or out in open) where that's the standard of service.

Or in other words: whereas many relatives used to have eg [Family Name], Rural Road #4, Smallishtown, Ontario, they have been renamed to things like 1156 Kimberlite Road, Smallishtown*. This is so that eg if police, ambulance, fire, whomever are scrambled to an address, that they actually get there, and not the Rural Road #4 in Nextdoortown (or even in an entirely different county). Unified databases and computers underly this all of course.

*Actually Smallishtown was probably absorbed in the early 2000s into a new municipality, Amalgotown, which is the name you are supposed to use officially, but everyone still calls it Smallishtown (but fortunately this isn't that hard for the emergency services that are somewhat local). Everyone complains, too - but then we still refer to the location of a local church under a municipality name that disappeared in 1850 or so and only locals know.

 

[Canada2020eh]

There are some places, like UPS stores that you can use their street address and then they call it a UNIT number, as if it was an apartment or condo at that address instead of saying Po Box which is a Canada Post thing. Have a search, many like that out there.