Zouk Princesse
Hero Member
- Aug 28, 2011
- 28
- Category........
- Visa Office......
- POS
- Job Offer........
- Pre-Assessed..
- App. Filed.......
- 14-Nov-2011
- File Transfer...
- 17-Jan-2012
- Med's Request
- VO requested med certificate extension from Ottawa 24-Jul-2012
- Med's Done....
- 16-Jul-2011
- Interview........
- Waived
- Passport Req..
- 24-Jul-2012
- VISA ISSUED...
- 17-Sep-2012
- LANDED..........
- 27-Sep-2012
Letters from close family and friends is excellent proof, especially for couples who are newly married, in long distance relationships, no kids, from different cultures, etc. because unfortunately those are the ones CIC tends to judge most harshly. These letters do not need to be notarized for married couples (common law, I think you might need to, check the requirements). It doesn't matter the person's profession or social status (doctors, judge, etc.). I think it's more important to have people who matter to you showing their support than some random mayor or board president. We had 3 types of letters for our application.
First we had a letter from the pastor who performed our ceremony, where he stated he had done our premarital counselling and basically just his honest feelings about us as a couple and our marriage. We had a second letter in the form of a speech from my husband's father: he was unable to attend our wedding, so he sent the speech to be read as father of the groom.
Our second type was from our wedding guest book. We had a wedding website with a guest book section containing about a dozen comments from our family and a couple close friends about our engagement and upcoming marriage. We just printed those pages and included them. If you do this, it's a good idea to have a spot for people to write how they're related to you. So ours included best friends, cousins, aunties, uncles, siblings.
Third, we printed a ton of stuff from Facebook, but particularly the comments from our status change to "engaged" and "married".
These are absolutely looked at by CIC. We ordered our gcms notes after approval and the file notes stated the proof used in judging our application, and those letters were included as part of what deemed us genuine. I'm not saying this to freak you out if you didn't include letters - there are many choices of excellent proof, and one can certainly make up for the other. However, if you're still gathering info, then letters are a great choice to include and can only enhance your application.
Regarding your parents not having met your spouse - that's fine as long as you explain up front why. If you leave it to CIC to connect the dots and make their own assumptions, that's not a good idea. But if you state up front this is the case, why it is so, and when they are expected to meet each other, you'll be fine. My husband and I were also in a long distance relationship, so he met my parents at the wedding for the first time. We just explained exactly that. One thing you can do in this situation is if your spouse has met anyone else in your family, (or vice versa) promote that fact. Close friends, uncles, aunts, siblings, etc. anyone who is close to you that has met your spouses helps to provide proof of a genuine relationship.
Hope this helps and good luck to all!
First we had a letter from the pastor who performed our ceremony, where he stated he had done our premarital counselling and basically just his honest feelings about us as a couple and our marriage. We had a second letter in the form of a speech from my husband's father: he was unable to attend our wedding, so he sent the speech to be read as father of the groom.
Our second type was from our wedding guest book. We had a wedding website with a guest book section containing about a dozen comments from our family and a couple close friends about our engagement and upcoming marriage. We just printed those pages and included them. If you do this, it's a good idea to have a spot for people to write how they're related to you. So ours included best friends, cousins, aunties, uncles, siblings.
Third, we printed a ton of stuff from Facebook, but particularly the comments from our status change to "engaged" and "married".
These are absolutely looked at by CIC. We ordered our gcms notes after approval and the file notes stated the proof used in judging our application, and those letters were included as part of what deemed us genuine. I'm not saying this to freak you out if you didn't include letters - there are many choices of excellent proof, and one can certainly make up for the other. However, if you're still gathering info, then letters are a great choice to include and can only enhance your application.
Regarding your parents not having met your spouse - that's fine as long as you explain up front why. If you leave it to CIC to connect the dots and make their own assumptions, that's not a good idea. But if you state up front this is the case, why it is so, and when they are expected to meet each other, you'll be fine. My husband and I were also in a long distance relationship, so he met my parents at the wedding for the first time. We just explained exactly that. One thing you can do in this situation is if your spouse has met anyone else in your family, (or vice versa) promote that fact. Close friends, uncles, aunts, siblings, etc. anyone who is close to you that has met your spouses helps to provide proof of a genuine relationship.
Hope this helps and good luck to all!