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Study permit shocker: Police clearance certificates needed to make application

ElmTree

Star Member
Dec 31, 2014
96
7
Okay this is weird and immensely disappointing in my current situation so I'm really hoping that someone could show me how to resolve this.

My wife got admission with scholarship from two of the top ranked Canadian universities. We have everything else going for us too. However, since we're currently in Pakistan, we'll need to make her study permit application in Islamabad visa office. Just discovered last night that Islamabad VO requires police clearance certificates too from all countries of residence since the age of 18. The checklist given in document IMM 5829 contains the following line:

"Police certificate from each country or territory where you have lived for six consecutive months or longer since reaching the age of 18."

In our case, my wife and I will have to get certificates from 8 different countries/territories. Some of them have known process to be 16 weeks (4 months) long. One of those (Singapore) doesn't even accept the application for police certificate unless you have already made the visa application and even after that they need a letter from the visa officer addressing Singapore police directly for provision of clearance of the applicant. Besides all this, VO will also most likely take 3 months to process 80% of the applications (we might end up being in 20% which take longer than 3 months). The admission and scholarship is for starting uni in September, which is 5 months away max. In the optimistic scenario, we would get our visa in 7 months from today, which is obviously no use to us :(

We're both comfortably eligible for FSW and EE too. If either of us had applied for that, we would've gotten ITA after March 27 draw. We didn't, precisely because we didn't have time this year to gather all the documentation (particularly the clearance certificates) and we knew we could also end up in Canada through wife's grad school (which is our reason for wanting to go to Canada anyway). Who would've thought the same clearance crap will come our way in this case too?! :mad:

Does anyone know a way out.... :(
 

wandermom

Hero Member
Jun 27, 2014
216
0
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^^ I'm sorry to hear this frustrating news. I advise you to comply to what the VOs are asking from you, Police Clearance is a must to show them that you have not committed crime in any country you stayed at for more than 6 months, even if you are applying for EE.

Maybe your wife can ask the school/institution to defer or move the date of intake to, say, a few months more so you'll have more time to comply with the Police Clearance certificates in those 8 countries.

Best of luck!