Hello

I am new to the site and have just spent ages reading through lots of interesting info.
My husband and I applied for permanent residency over 3 years ago and have just received our visa's! We are now planning on moving over to Edmonton, Alberta as soon as we sell our house. Chris is a police officer in Greater Manchester and I am a Primary Care Counsellor for the NHS - also a police officer for nearly 10 years up until 18 months ago. We have a son who is almost 16 years old and a daughter of 8 years. I have an aunt and 3 cousins living in Alberta - they moved over 30 years ago and love it. I will hopefully join the forums and thrash some questions around soon!

Lorraine, Chris, Alexander and Olivia Hamer -

Hello & welcome to the forum, although I have only just introduced myself, so feel a little fraudulent to do so!

Many congratulations on receiving your visas!!!

We hail from Manchester & I was very interested to hear you are a practising primary care counsellor. I am currently on placement with the NHS and due to qualify next year. Would you mind if I sent you a PM as I would like to hear your views on prospective employment in Canada?

Anyway, well done and the best of luck with this exciting stage of your lives.

Jo-Anne

Hi - nice to hear from you. By all means send me a pm and I will help all I can - if I can!!! I have been trying to see if there are any equivalent roles to my current one and there doesn't appear to be. They seem big on psychology which obviously is a completely different ball game! Where are you up to with your studying? The thing I have realised is qualifications are very important and even in psychotherapy people have their masters degrees etc - wow! I need to study more!!!

Where are you up to with your immigration process?

Another hello from Lancashire, we also have our visa's now and we actually fly out on 29th Aug.
OH is retired from police force. He misses it though.
Congratulations on getting your visa's and good luck with the house selling. I've got the estate agent coming round tomorrow so its been a day of hiding things in cupboards and big decutter for the photos....
OH's house is on market as well, but very slow, only had one viewing. Not a great time for selling.
Great site and you'll get loads of help if you have any queries.
Good Luck

Hi chrislol & Caimas - welcome to the forum.

To chrislol and emmabell - Congratulations to both of you in getting your visas and everything crossed for you that your properties sell quickly.

Kind regards

Eamonn & Janet

Thanks for the contact - it's comforting to know people are in similar positions. I think Eamon and Janet, that I have read some of your updates - the one after 8 weeks in Canada? I tried to show it to Chris but couldn't find it again! How's it going now? It's nice to hear how people who are actually living in Canada (in particular Alberta) are doing and what it's really like. I have quite mixed feelings due to leaving family/friends but feel the UK is not the place to be bringing up my children at the moment. Do you feel it's a safer place to live? Chris is a serving police officer and I was for 10 years so we're not naive to problems - the times we have spent in Canada have been fab but from a "only on holiday" perspective!!!

Lorraine and Chris

Jo-anne - I forgot to ask which Trust you are with - I work for the Pennine Care Trust in Bury.

Lorraine

Hello and welcome to BE

Hi Chris - congratulations on getting your visas through!

Welcome to the site and good luck with your journey

Oldham Primary Care Trust.

Hi Lorraine & Chris,

Yes, we posted along the lines you mention. One way to find historic posts of a BE member is to left click on their name on the left hand side of the post and then left click on, in our case, "Find more posts by Getting There". You'll see the posts you mention there although, to save you doing that, here's the links...
http://britishexpats.com/forum/showthread.php?t=544853
http://britishexpats.com/forum/showthread.php?t=544854
You can always see our blog by clicking on the link in the signature line below.

Still going well here tho' Jan is having a bit of a time re being feasted upon by mossies :curse: ...but we have posted on another thread about that! But as ever, we think it's important that people know both the fabulous and the not so fabulous aspects of moving out here. You're feelings re leaving family and friends are entirely natural and we went through that (and still do at times, in waves - again, it's important to us to be realistic in what we post and unless an individual has no friends and family to miss then it is important to recognise this as a factor that needs addressing). We saw it as a key risk to our success in settling and have tried to mitigate it with the use of technology (frequent phone calls, emails, use of IM, webcam, the blog, Facebook, etc, etc) and this, along with visitors coming out to see us, has certainly helped.

Re does it feel safer...to us, yes, absolutely, although that is perhaps partly due to living out in Okotoks. Perhaps we would feel less so if we lived in NE Calgary or maybe if our lives revolved around downtown Calgary (not that this has ever felt as threatening as going out in parts of London or St Albans of an evening has felt at times).

Re your "only on holiday" comment, we certainly had the same train of thought. That was why, for our final research trip, we sacrificed some of our employment pay to take some unpaid leave and came out for 5 weeks last June/July. We rented a condo rather than a hotel and we tried to live a little more like we thought it might be "day to day" and less like it was a holiday. Is that entirely possible?...of course not...but did it help to give us a more realistic feel...yes, we think so.

Eamonn & Janet.

Eamonn and Janet

Thank you very much for all that useful info - will keep you updated with our decisions. We are going for a week in October, primarily to get our visa's stamped - but also to do a bit of "quick" research. We might do similar to you and try to spend a longer period there in rented accommodation. The problem we have is that we both have well paid jobs here and a nice home and good standard of living - my job is definately not comparible in Canada and my qualifications not really recognised. Neither is my husbands. He is in communications in the police and on a reasonable salary. A last resort for him would joining the EPS and going back to training and being on the streets front line, but with 17 years service in he really doesn't want to do that! When we applied 3 years ago things were different - the house prices in Alberta hadn't shot up and we could have bought outright with our equity - now for an equivalent home we would need a £120,000 plus mortgage (pounds not dollars) - Poo! - We definately don't want to come over and be in a worse position financially. We are prepared to work hard but again, without the right qualifications that is appearing a bit difficult too. Do I sound totally negative?!!!

From

Hi Chrislol,

Totally negative?...no...totally realistic/grounded/trying to make the best judgement for your and yours?...absolutely.

Feel free to look us up when you come over in October (you can PM us for details if you wish).

Re your situation in the UK, Jan and I were in the same boat, in some respects anyway. We both had pretty well paid jobs and a mortgage we had managed to reduce significantly over the years. Our original thoughts were to buy a house outright here but then the prices spiked in 2006 and that wish went out the window (at least, it did in the sense that we wanted a pretty decent property - we could have compromised on that but chose not to). We also decided that we wanted to release some of the equity that we had built up in our UK property in order to help sustain us financially in the first couple of years. As such, we now have a pretty steep mortgage, one modest salary in Jan's and a second stream of income hopefully beginning to come on line in the several months ahead as I complete licensing courses for my chosen profession and as I try and get a small business off the ground.

We have, at times, definitely assessed our situation in financial Profit & Loss terms and we considered that, in the first 2 years, we are unlikely to break even financially - ie: we will eat into our savings/released equity. It's a risk and like all risks, we may later regret taking it, but we are seeing this move as an investment in our futures and that in order to realise future "profits" (be they financial or more subtle and subjective quality of life issues) then we need to make this investment in ourselves in the short to medium term.

How does that translate to jobs? Well, we could both have chosen to go back to working for large corporates as we did in the UK, (and that might be our contingency if Plan A fails!), but we were bored silly with that and decided we wanted to follow a different path, whilst still choosing professions that utilise the skills we have naturally and/or have acquired along the way. If you do not think that there is a particular demand for the exact role/s you perform today (or if there is a completely understandable desire NOT, in your OH's case, to go back on the beat) then maybe you can apply the same logic re looking at alterative career choices...appreciating that it would probably require the same sort of risk taking and "investment" in yourselves as a result.

It's by no means an easy decision to make and is unique to the individuals concerned. We would never think someone was being negative by going back to first principles and asking themselves again why they are doing this and we would certainly never trivialise the complexity of the decision you and others face by suggesting "it's all wonderful here" as that just isn't realistic.

Wishing you all the best,

Eamonn (and Janet)