A question for Reba ;)

Hi Reba...

Do you mind if I ask you a question? If, for some personal reason, you prefer not to be too specific, that's ok.

You wrote: "If I had my druthers I'd stay right here in Canada, but Canadian immigration won't let my husband in, so I have no choice but to move to the US if I want to be with him, which obviously I do, or I wouldn't have married him " ...

Do you mind telling us why immigration won't let your husband in?

I ask because I'm thinking of returning to Canada with my American husband, to live there permanently. He has his own income, would be selling his house to buy another up there, is healthy etc....But, you never know. I like to anticipate as many potential glitches as possible, before they happen.

Thanks! Julie

sorry Julie, for some reason I never caught this post!

My husband has a jeuvenile criminal record. He stole a car when he was 16, and the court record was erroneously entered as an adult charge when they updated from paper files to computer files. When a border guard saw that and decided she didn't like his haircut er sumthin, she banned him, pending loads and loads of paperwork.

He has to have an approved "Rehabilitation Form" completed and signed by a representative of the Minister of Immigration Canada, and has to get a Minister's Permit. We have been working on this since August of 2001. Canadian Immigration (CIC) has lost documents we've sent, lost them *again*, changed forms and told us we need to do new ones, changed processing centres and told us we need to send it to the new one, rejected it at the new one and told us to send it back to the other one, and then his FBI certificate was long expired by then, so he had to get a new one, then the FBI lost the request and on and on and on and on...

We finally gave up when I lost my job in Canada last year and flipped over to have me move to the US. That took a year to do that paperwork even, but I'm finally here now as of Oct. 11th.

We plan on trying again with CIC, but we need to scrape up some money and patience before we start dealing with them again I'm debating whether to wait until I have my Green Card here (could be 4 years for that), or sooner. I guess it just depends on how life goes.

It even took the Minister's office 6 weeks to reply to a letter I sent them asking for compassionate grounds to admit him to Canada for a visit just so he could be with me when I needed to have emergency expedited surgery last month. My surgery is over and done with, and I'm moved already

CIC sucks, but both of us would really prefer to live in Canada.