Wife's passport will expire in 1 year...what should we do??

[fandv]

Hi everyone...

I'm a Canadian citizen who's sponsoring my Indonesian wife to Canada. We're 99.99% done with our application, and are about to ship it tomorrow to CPC-Mississauga.

But geez...! I was reading the immigrant's guide one last time, and I saw this:

"You and your family members must have valid passports or travel documents. If any of the documents are to expire soon, you should renew them and provide copies of the new passport or travel document to the office processing your application."

So the thing is, my wife's passport will expire in March 2014. If we are really, really lucky, and got the passport request, say, in December 2013, then by then she would only have 3 months of validity left on her passport (which is probably a bad thing, because usually most countries require at least 6 months of validity).

If my wife wanted to, she could probably start the passport renewal process next week, but we're not sure how long it would take. The thing is, we've wanted to ship the sponsorship application in mid-December, but since the police took so long to release my wife's police certificate, we got delayed till now, and we just can't wait to mail the application to CPC-Mississauga. So that means, if we wanted to include the photocopy of my wife's new passport, the shipment of the sponsorship application would be delayed even further (because we would have to wait for her new passport to be issued, then photocopy it, get it notarised again, etc, and all of these take time!)

So my questions are:

1. What if we just go ahead and ship the sponsorship application tomorrow to CPC-Mississauga anyway, and then get my wife's passport renewed within the coming weeks, and then once we get our UCI number, we'd then just mail the photocopy of her new passport to the Singapore VO? Would this actually be acceptable?

2. Instead of mailing the photocopy of my wife's new passport all the way to Singapore, what if we just scan and e-mail it? Do the visa officers accept email attachments?

3. Once my wife has acquired her new passport, is it REALLY necessary to send the photocopy of the new passport to the visa office? If so, why?
Assuming my wife's PR application is approved *fingers crossed*, the VO will eventually request my wife to send her (actual) passport anyway, and I'm very sure that by then, my wife will already have her new passport, which she can send when requested by the VO. Can't we just do this? It's a lot simpler...


Cheers!

 

[truesmile]

Our experience is not with Singapore, and I'm SURE there's a way to do it, BUT we delayed our application just so we could send our application in with a NEW passport - just issued. Just followed our gut, we had not found this forum by that time.

 

[fandv]

Our experience is not with Singapore, and I'm SURE there's a way to do it, BUT we delayed our application just so we could send our application in with a NEW passport - just issued. Just followed our gut, we had not found this forum by that time.

Thanks for the reply, truesmmile!

Whoops, just found out from my wife, that the Indonesian immigration usually only allows passport renewal when it has at most 6 months of remaining validity. Now it's January 2013, which means her passport still has 14 months of validity remaining....which means that probably it won't be till September 2013 that the immigration will process the renewal. Arghhh!! I guess we'll ask the immigration today, whether they can make an exception (I.e: letting my wife renew as early as now) and whether there's an express service...

 

[canadianwoman]

You can send in the PR application now with the current passport info. Then once your wife gets a new passport, you can send this info to the visa office processing her file - supposing she hasn't already gotten the PR visa before then.