pogobb said:
I agree that everything has changed now. Mainland Chinese are much richer than Hong Kong people. I was back to Canada last Christmas with
Toby, if you don't mind me asking, what kind of problems did you encounter?
First it was not clear whether our PR application would be processed through Hong Kong or Beijing. The choice was CIC's to make. Yet the document checklist for HK and Beijing were structured differently, so if we wanted to organize our application in accordance with the checklist, we had to resolve and explain the differences to the CIC officer. We decided to follow the Beijing checklist, but write notes to refer the CIC officer to a different place in the application that dealt with a requirement specific to the Hong Kong checklist.
In some cases the HK checklist asked for documents the Beijing checklist did not, and vice versa. We decided to include all documents, and explain why -- an unnecessary complication that seemed more serious at the time than it does now, in retrospect.
My wife was denied a (1) student visa and (2) a visitor's visa to Canada, even though we live in China and clearly had every reason to return so as not to jeopardize the PR application. A Canadian acquaintance and his wife -- in very similar circumstances -- were granted a visitor's visa. It seemed that a cloud was hovering over our heads!
When denied the visitor's visa, I got the CAIPS notes, saw the facile reasoning the VO had used, and complained to Beijing about the poor logic and arbitrary powers that allow one VO to deny us a tourist visa while another (or even worse, the same VO) granted a visa to my Canadian acquaintance.
The VO (in the CAIPS notes) had even said that we had not included much evidence of our valid and continuing relationship, and used this as proof that the visa should be denied. But that requirement is nowhere mentioned in the guide to a tourist visa!! It was invented by the VO to justify refusing the visa.
I complained about all this to the embassy, the Director of Policy replied, we discussed further, and she suggested that if I decided to re-apply I should include certain points of our discussion in a cover letter. But I had included precisely those points in the original cover letter! When I pointed this out, she had nothing more to say. VOs have immense discretionary (arbitrary) powers, and don't seem to be accountable even to a director of policy.
(And let's ask ourselves why taxpayers need to fund a director of policy in an embassy? Isn't policy determined by headquarters in Ottawa? Isn't this an unnecessary expense?)
A final affront, then I'm finished. When we got the letter requiring us to come to an interview, the letter said we should bring a list of up-to-date documents, and if we did not the visa might well be refused,
BUT that if we had already included these documents in the original application we need not do so again.
Given the serious consequence of not bringing a necessary document to the interview, we naturally wondered whether the original Police Report (now more than a year old) was considered "up to date", or was considered outdated and needing to be renewed. I asked this question in this forum, and was advised by those most knowledgeable that we should get another Police Report. TO do so would have been a hardship and a great expense (I won't go into the reasons here).
Another document required was a certificate of eligibility to marry for my wife. But such a document does not exist for a Chinese person never married!!
And they asked for a copy of my certificate of eligibility to marry, even though the original was with the application. I had to get the vice-consul of Beijing to send them an email saying that copies are not made. One arm of the government (HK) does not seem to know what another arm (Beijing) is doing.
And there were other documents they mentioned specifically, leaving us to decide in each case whether the document included with the application was sufficient or needed to be renewed.
It seemed clear that this was a form letter, not one written by someone remotely familiar with our application. But we could not take the risk, and not bring an essential document to the interview. So I finally wrote to the consulate, gave my reasoning why each document listed in their letter was not necessary, and they agreed.
What a lot of fuss that could have been avoided if they had simply taken a little time with the application, and listed documents that they really did need. We applicants spend months assembling the the applications, but HK (at least) seemed unaware of the contents.
And even today the CIC website lists an address we left more than a year ago!
All's well that ends well, I suppose. We got the PR visa. But I have little positive to say about the process itself.
