Vervain said:
I posted this before but never got a response so I'll try again now and see if anyone knows anything. We sent in our app and everything seems to be in order. I was just wondering though if anyone has actually heard or known someone who was denied because their child was in school without a study permit. My Visitor's record is up on Sept 1st so we need to renew again then, the IO did this so that we would HAVE to come back before school and get a new Study Permit for my son at that time. He had attended one year 2007 with a permit but then we never went back for the next two years. We will definitely be getting a new permit for him at the end of the month when I renew my VR. I know they can deem us inadmissable because of the study permit issue. I am just hoping that they won't. Not much to be done about it if they do say no but I was curious about other's stories.
Your outland application for permanent residence and your temporary status in Canada are two different things. Immigration Canada says your son needs a study permit to attend school - even at public school level. The problem is that minor children attending school in Canada falls under the jurisdiction of each province, NOT Immigration Canada. Some provinces require that minor children attend school regardless of their immigration status, and they will require you to enroll your child - and the school will accept the enrollment - whether you child has a SP or not. At the same time, Immigration Canada
can find you in violation of the Act for sending your child to school without a SP. What we learned, though, was that CIC cannot enter a school and remove a child, and the schools are not allowed to disclose information to CIC about whether a child is enrolled. That said, if you end up in a situation where an immigration officer is asking you whether your child is attending school, you have to be truthful . . . and that could cost you. In addition, they are not above pretending that they already know your child is attending school - especially if you're in a province where it's mandatory - and they'll mess you up over that, too. We tried SIX times to get my child a SP and we got the run-around from Immigration Canada every time. Our province requires that minors attend school - so we finally just gave up and enrolled her. When it finally caught up with us - because finalization of our PR was delayed by a refusal - we were really caught between a rock and a hard spot.
So, IMHO, this needs to be resolved. One thing I don't understand is why you didn't just
apply to extend your son's study permit from within Canada? They can't force you to come to the border to extend - if he was documented on an SP, you had what you needed to apply to extend from within Canada - and assuming he is included as a dependent on your PR application, there's no reason his SP wouldn't have been extended. Since you let it lapse you're now forced to get a new SP for him by applying from "outside" Canada, but you can probably still do that by mail from within Canada.
I see your ap is being processed through Buffalo, so possibly you're a US citizen. If so, you can apply at the border for a SP, but I think it might be beneficial - since you have some time before school starts - to mail a SP application to Buffalo for processing. If the ap is approved, they'll send you what you need to go to the border and pick up an SP. (When we tried to apply at the border, we were told this was what we had to do anyway - although they never told us we could do it by mail!) Send proof of support from your sponsor, a letter of acceptance from the school, proof that your son is included as a dependent child on your PR ap and proof of your valid temporary status (which will probably require proof that you've applied to extend and it's been received by CPC-V). It's possible they'll refuse it - they did when I applied for my daughter but that was while our PR ap was still under appeal - but the fact of the matter is that there really shouldn't be any reason for them to refuse it. Just don't get into how he's been going to school in Canada for the past two years without a permit.
