oh that does suck!! Ours was very straight forward I have to admit, fingers crossed, you still have a bit of time. Where are you heading? Can you defer to January?

In case this benefits anyone else, we recently did our soft landing at Pearson and it couldn’t have gone quicker or more smoothly.

Well, that is apart from the 30-hour delay to our Air Transat flight from Manchester, but that’s obviously the airline’s fault. There’s another thread on this if anyone’s interested.

When we finally made it to Toronto it was around 6.30pm local time and we were directed to the machines to fill out our declarations along with most other passengers (NEXUS card holders were able to skip the machines). We selected ‘Emigrate’ as ‘purpose of visit and then followed the instructions, got the print out and headed to see the CBSA officers.

We were directed to ‘secondary’ and met by a young officer who asked if we had our COPRs and upon us saying that we had, took us through to process us. From there on it took about 20 minutes with the chap going through our paperwork, taking our address for the PR cards (some relatives had kindly let us use theirs) and getting us to sign everything, to getting our SINs from the Service Canada counter and being out to collect our bags.

The officer didn’t ask us any questions other than the the ones on the COPR (criminal convictions etc.). We had proof of funds with us but it turned out not to be needed. I asked if he could stamp our Goods to Follow list but he said we had to go to the counter for that, so he duly led us there and his colleague did that and filled in the relevant form.

We also had a Goods Accompanying list but he said he didn’t need to see it. So after months of researching and obsessing over this process, it was over in a flash. It was made all the more surreal by the booth next to ours being occupied by an Albanian traveller being given the third degree very loudly by another officer and him replying even louder. All in a day for a CBSA officer I expect.

Another thing worth pointing out is that a few days after landing we crossed the border into the USA for a short visit. Upon returning to Canada, as advised on here we showed our passports and COPRs (bearing in mind we obviously didn’t have PR cards) and that too was an extremely quick and painless process.