keesio said:
It's tricky. I had a lot of assignments and business travel abroad for my Canadian employer. None of it was applicable towards PR RO when I investigated it. This was what I was informed by CIC officials. Now, I know that CIC can be inconsistent, but in this case I didn't have a single CIC official say it would be accepted. It ended up not mattering for me since I ended up applying for citizenship and not counting those days on travel (citizenship RO is more strict and there is no debate that those days don't count). So in regards to the exact letter of the law, CIC seems to have a strict interpretation of it.
I agree, emphatically, that qualifying for the exception does indeed appear to be
tricky unless the PR is a regular employee for a Canadian business ordinarily working in a location in Canada, and it is a very straight-forward temporary assignment abroad. There is, for example, some incongruity in requiring that it be both a
full time position and also a
temporary assignment.
Thus, while
Leon straight-forwardly stated the essence of the rule and that the work arrangement described by
xpro would not qualify for the assignment, whenever I see these queries I think it really needs to be said, if not emphasized, that CBSA and CIC (with the backing of the Federal Courts) have
narrowly interpreted and restrictively applied this rule.
Last I looked, the primary source for CIC's information about the rule, in the appendix to the guide for PR card applications, is still a misleading understatement, even though the applicable operational manual, as one of the few manuals recently updated, has incorporated the more narrow and restrictive interpretation as sanctioned by the IAD and Federal Courts.
Despite the narrow, restrictive interpretation and application, however, that is not to say the rule is ineffective or generally unavailable. I have no idea why your particular circumstances would not have qualified for credit as time in Canada, but there are also many cases in which PRs are given credit for the time they spent abroad employed by a Canadian business.
There is little doubt, though, that a PR relying on this credit should be extremely careful in assessing its applicability to his or her situation. It is my impression that many PRs have erroneously relied on this rule, in large part as advised by less than reputable (and usually unauthorized) consultants. And the consequences generally cannot be undone.
