Work permits, teacher holidays, Covid-19 and bad luck: Why we have not been home.

During the 19 months we have lived in Canada, we have not been back home to the U.K to visit. The reasons why are complex and frustrating, but I’m going to do my best to explain them here.

Remember when the blogs on West Country Wandering were updates about our attempts to get to Canada when the boarder was closed? I bet you thought the days when Canadian Immigration ruled our lives and we were endlessly waiting for contact from a faceless bureaucratic government body were over. I know I did.

Oh how naïve I was!

Currently, we are waiting to be given an extension to our original work permits/visas which will allow us four extra months (starting from February) living and working in Canada, for the meantime we have temporary ‘permission’ to work but not leave the country.

Confused? I don’t blame you!

Let’s go back to the start.

Our first visas for working in Canada

In October 2019, Jacob was offered a job in Canada, at which point he applied for a two year employer specific work permit sponsored by his Canadian employer. We also applied for a two year ‘open work permit’ for me, as a spouse and dependent of Jacob.

An ‘Open Work Permit’ allows you to apply for any job, located anywhere in Canada, barring, and it actually states this on my work permit, ‘strip clubs’! Whereas, with an employer specific work permit you can only work for the employer who sponsored your visa.

As you may remember, from the story of our original plans for moving to Canada, Jacob arrived in Canada in February 2020. At which point he received his visa and his two year permission to work in Canada began. Then, three weeks later, when the Canadian boarder closed due to Covid-19, he came back to the U.K and we both arrived in Canada in late August 2020.

Although I did not enter Canada until August, my Open Work Permit – as it was granted as a ‘dependent’ of Jacob – actually also began in February 2020 and would therefore expire, like Jacob’s, in February 2022.

The boarder closure during our first year in Canada

During our first year here, the Canadian boarder remained closed due to Covid-19. With the boarder closed, we would have potentially jeopardized our right to work here if we had tried to return to the U.K for a visit. Had we done so and not been granted permission to re-enter, we would have also been trapped on a different continent from Bally-the-Greyhound.

To be honest, until August 2021, I was not too upset about not being able to go back to the U.K. I actually felt far more sad that the boarder closure meant that friends and family could not come here and experience beautiful British Columbia.

Then the long, Canadian school summer holiday began, it was eleven months since we had left the U.K and I felt sad that I had so much time on my hands, but was not able to go home.

We had many great adventures that summer and I knew I had to except not being able to visit the U.K, since leaving Canada while the boarder was closed could still mean potentially losing our right to work and I had just landed a new, permanent, job as a teacher in an Elementary School in Prince George.

But then, in August, a family member I am very close to and one of my all time favorite human beings had a heart attack. Being trapped by a boarder closure at a time when you know you are needed at home and desperately want to be there, was not a feeling I ever want to experience again.

As September approached, the date that the boarder was set to open and we would be able to travel freely without fear of losing our right to work in Canada grew closer.

The Canadian boarder opens

The problem is, that that date, when the boarders would finally open, was the 7th September 2021. The same date that the holiday ended and school started. I had signed a contract, I was starting my new job on the same day we could finally go to the U.K and see people.

Thanks government of Canada, thanks a bunch.

Admittedly, I can see why they did it. By ending the boarder closure when the school holidays ended, they limited the number of people who could have potentially entered Canada at a time when Covid-19 was still busy doing its thing.

It was a smart move but it really penalized people who work in education.

The Canadian boarder opened, people were travelling again, our friends went to the U.K for three weeks almost as soon as the boarder opened in September. But we had to hold on until the school Christmas holiday, only three and a half months to wait.

Christmas in the U.K

Throughout September and October we waited to see whether the Covid-19 situation would ramp up again before buying our tickets to spend Christmas at home. The pervious year Christmas had effectively been cancelled just a week before by the British Prime Minister; so we were careful not to get our hopes up too much.

Our friends returned from the U.K having had no problems with their travel and telling envy-inducing tales of consuming three Greggs vegan Sausage Rolls a day.

But still we waited to buy our plane tickets. By late November, the general feeling that things were different this winter convinced us to do it: we booked our plane tickets home for Christmas.

We told everyone we would be in the U.K for two weeks during the school Christmas holiday and at that point, knowing I would be seeing people soon, the need to be there and see friends and family really intensified.

Meets ups were planned, spa trips were booked, Christmas presents were ready to pack.

Then four days before we were due to fly, the Canadian government announced a travel advisory for the Christmas period due to the Omicon variant. Canadian citizens and people living in Canada were asked not to engage in non-essential travel.

Jean-Yves Duclos, Canada’s Health Minister, made it pretty plain in a statement: “To those who were planning to travel, I say very clearly, now is not the time to travel”.

There were also warnings that if temporary foreign workers chose to travel outside of Canada, they may not be permitted reentry as when they returned. For two people, without citizenship, with jobs and a old dog in Canada that was a serious threat.

After a day of deliberation (and tears) we decided we really had not been left much choice, we could not go. One of the toughest parts of that decision was knowing that, while the government ‘travel advisory’ was only planned for a month, being a teacher, I did not have the flexibility to say ‘it’s okay we’ll go in February’. I knew I would now have to wait until the Spring school holiday. Another three months away.

So we braced for another three months of waiting and hoping. Spring is the worst time in Prince George; but an utterly stunning time in the U.K. We could do this. We could get to March.

There was a miraculous, barely believable, silver lining. Despite asking people who lived in Canada not to leave for a month, they did not close the boarder. Fully vaccinated foreigners, who tested negative for Covid-19, could still come to Canada.

This meant that, to our utter amazement, after 16 months apart, I was reunited with my Mum who braved temperatures around -27 to spend all of January here. We created some blogs together, you can read all about her experience of defying the pandemic to get here and her adventures in Northern British Columbia.

The end of our first visa

During January 2022, as well as having fun in the snow with my Mum, we also had to address the fact that Jacob’s work contract and both our visas would expire within a month, at the end of February.

Jacob’s supervisor offered him a four month extension to his contract in order for him to be able to tie up some loose ends; which meant we could both apply for extensions to our existing visas.

Jacob very hastily submitted an application to Canadian immigration to extent both our visas by four months, starting at the end of February. He had to submit this application a month before the visa ran out in order for us to be granted ‘Maintained Status’ while we waited for the new visas to come.

Maintained status

‘Maintained status’, also called ‘Implied status’, means that while we are waiting for the visa extension to be processed, we can maintain our legal immigration status as ‘Temporary Foreign Workers’ and carry on working until a decision is made on our application.

As we submitted the application for the extension a month before our visas ended, we knew we should be eligible for Maintained Status and, to our relief, Canadian immigration wrote to us almost immediately after we submitted the application, confirming that we had been granted Maintained Status.

The letter stated that we had been granted permission to ‘continue working with the same conditions’ until either 25th May or when our new visas were processed.

This was a relief, I did not much fancy telling my inner-city school, which struggles to recruit teachers, that I could not, legally, finish the school year.

But, my heart sank when I read the part of the letter that stated ‘If you leave Canada before a decision is made on your application, you will no longer be authorized to continue working’.

This meant that while we were in the nether zone, officially called Maintained Status, between two work permits/visas we could not leave the country.

Spring Break

When we were granted Maintained Status, Spring Break was still seven weeks away, I was confident that our visas would come through in time.

Keen to do anything we could to make this happen, we wrote – obviously they make it impossible for you to contact them by writing or other means but we summited a useless web form – to Canadian Immigration hoping for some sympathy.

We explained that we had not been able to visit the U.K, even when a loved one was unwell, because we had followed the Canadian Covid-19 travel rules and because I was unable to select when I have time off work. We made it clear that if the new visa came through before the 14th March, we would be able to travel to the U.K for Spring Break.

We received a stock response quoting the rule that if we left Canada while we had Maintained Status and no visa, we would not be allowed to re-enter as workers, only tourists.

Right up to the day before Spring Break I remained hopeful that our visas would come in time to visit the U.K.

But they did not.

My hopes of daffodils, lambs and green hills; of celebrating my sisters 30th birthday (six months late), of meeting my best friend’s baby (a year late, she is now one), of being there to toast my Grandma on her 80th birthday, were dashed.

What next?

The visa extension still has not come through. Our Maintained Status expires on the 25th May, there is now a very real chance that we could wake up on the 26th May no longer eligible to work in Canada. My rather wonderful Principle saw the humorous side of that situation, when she said ‘you can still work, we just can’t pay you’.

The ridiculous thing is that when the new visas do arrive, they only last until the end of the June 2022 anyway!

Inevitably, we have long since started thinking about what is next for us after June. Currently, and rather stressfully, we have no answers to that question.

Whatever happens next, I hope that I never experience the combination of the slowness of visa processing, the limiting impact of not being able to choose when you take time off work, Covid-19 government restrictions and bad luck, which has meant that we have not been able to visit the U.K.

. . .

Wondering how we were able to come to Canada to work during a pandemic?

A little less arrogant about how far a British passport and a smile can get you

Part two: How Coronavirus derailed our plans for moving to Canada.

Wednesday’s Weekly Update

Flying into the unknown: moving to Canada during a global pandemic.

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