Hi all, I am born Australian plus also a United Kingdom citizen. So basically i have two entry points to gain access to Canada for work purposes.

Does anyone have any advice, on the British side of how i should go about this. I am moving to Yellowknife for advancement of my x-country ski career for Australia but also to work and study.

I have done some research of the area, with work opportunities and availability of housing looking better than i first thought.

Any help much appreciated, i plan to move over within the first or second quarter next year.

P.S if there is anything i should be aware of that is vitally important other than temperature, please advise.

Hi and welcome.

Your first concern needs to be how you will get a visa. I've got no idea about what options are available to you as an Aussie, but these links will tell you how to go about it as a Brit. I think you'll struggle to work and study as most visas will only let you do one or the other. You could get a study permit but you need to be aware that you can only do limited work on that (I think - although am not sure so do check it out - that you can only work 20hrs a week and only after you've been there 6 months).

Bunac (working holiday visa, open work permit for one year) might be an option open to you if you're under 30? But applications open in a week or two so you'd need to get in quick!! And you'd also have to be back in the UK whilst your visa was being processed so I don't know if that's an option? And you can't study on that.

If neither of the above routes suit then you'll need to concentrate on finding a job to be able to get in to Canada, but have a read of the following Wiki articles.

http://britishexpats.com/wiki/Quick_...an_Immigration

http://britishexpats.com/wiki/Labour_Shortages-Canada

http://britishexpats.com/wiki/Working_Holiday_Visas

http://britishexpats.com/wiki/Canada...erent%21%21%21


Good luck.

Thanks mate, ill take a read

Good info re Brits from christmasoompa, but I think another Aussie poster recently said he was going to Canada on a two-year working holiday visa. I remember seeing other comments in the past to the effect that Aussies have it better in that regard than Brits.
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Rhetorical question: How many waitresses in Calgary, and hospitality industry employees in Banff and area are from Oz?

You are a very brave man, Yellowknife has a horrid average winter temperature. Couldn't you do the x country skiing at Whistler instead?

Yellowknife only has between 5 and 6 hours of daylight at this time of year plus some pretty extreme temperatures not really conducive to x-country skiing.

It's very isolated and will be very expensive to live there as most things have to be flown in.

As Danny B says can't you do this at Whistler or maybe Canmore in Alberta where the 1988 x-country Olympic competitions were held. Banff is another option. Even Calgary lots of x-country trails in Kananaskis.

I got offered double what I earn now, plus the isolation allowance to work in Yellowknife for two years. I turned it down, having been there.

Anyone know enough about the north to compare Yellowknife with Anchorage?

I would have considered Anchorage. Does that answer your question?

I have never been to either place, but there are a couple of factors that one should be able to figure out from afar.

First of all Anchorage's population is 280,000, whereas Yellowknife's is less than one tenth that at about 20,000.

With Anchorage being at 61 deg N and Yellowknife 62 deg N, they are at similar latitudes. Hence the number of hours of daylight would be similar.

But Anchorage's climate is moderated by the sea, and it doesn't get as cold as Yellowknife gets.

In addition to the fact that Anchorage has a larger population, which generally means more shops and a greater variety of merchandise, Anchorage has an ice-free port. This would enable it to import goods by sea, which is a cheaper method of transportation than the land or air routes on which Yellowknife would have to rely. The Anchorage Economic Development Corporation's website (admittedly not an information source that I would trust to be unbiased) claims that the cost of living in Anchorage is the same as it is in Portland, Oregon. Yellowknife's cost of living clearly is much higher than the COL in a town of comparable size in a southern part of Canada.

The people whom I know who have lived in Yellowknife have either loved it or hated it. I knew a guy in Calgary who had moved there from Yellowknife because he had fallen in love with and married a woman from Calgary. He moved to Calgary because it was easier for him to relocate his career to Calgary than it was for her to relocate hers to Yellowknife. But he described his departure from Yellowknife as a sacrifice that he was making consciously.

I think that, in the case of Canada's Far North, the rest of us forum members are even less qualified to predict who will and will not like the area than is the case with respect to Southern Canada.

I see dingbat has answered your question about Anchorage, dbd33. But the reasons that I supplied may help British posters who have never been to Canada, much less the Far North.
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Anchorage has an "anchorage" ie it's by the sea, and the sea is warmed by the Japanese current. I have cousins in Anchoarage. One came to stay with us for a year in Manchester. She complained how much she missed swimmimg in the sea. We took her to Wales to swim in the sea. She dived in, and ran screaming out - it was too cold!

Yellowknife. I've been to Yellowknife in December. It was another, deeper, drier, harder level of cold and dark. Southern Alberta is like California in comparison.

And in summer the blackflies eat you alive.

You can only drive to YK in winter, 'cos that's when the ice road is open (obviously). If the road is closed and the ferry is down you can't get fruit and veggies, or milk, or cheese or fresh meat....

Snowmobiles are licenced for the roads.

It's also flat, featureless, drab and miles from anywhere.

It probably does. One of my kids has a radio show out of Anchorage (http://krua.uaa.alaska.edu/ 9 am Tuesdays) she's not a wilderness person but she seems to be doing ok up there. If Yellowknife doesn't have even a student radio station thats quite remote.

I assume chicken is seasonal, and also very expensive?

R.

It's widely rumoured the KFC serves raven not chicken.

Never been there myself but I know a few Air Traffic Controllers who were posted there.

Only one ever volunteered to go back as a summer fill in type, but then we always did think he was a little odd.