Canada Visa

Hello everyone,

I finally received my passport back today. I wanted to share my experience of applying for a Canadian visitor visa with all of you, as this site helped me tremendously to stay calm while dealing with the whole ordeal. I did a joint application with my spouse, and here is a timeline of our events:

Oct 25 – Initiated the visa application on the official Canadian government website.

Oct 28 – Online application submitted with all required documents.

Nov 5 – I received a message saying that I need to submit my passport, with a link included to pull details of where I could send in my passport. At the time, it made sense for me to send it to the New York office, since it was closest to my current place of residence. I proceeded to work on putting together everything that needs to be sent with our applications.

Nov 6 - Application is ready to be shipped out. I chose to use USPS and included transmission fee for both our applications as well as insurance/return label.
Nov 8 – Application was received by the New York center, signed for by a “C Wilson”.

Nov 16 – I received an email from VFS Global saying that the application was missing the updated consent form. My spouse and I received separate emails, but the email sent to my spouse indicated an additional charge of $41.50 for courier service fee.

I was confused about this and reached out to VFS over chat. The operator on the other end was trying to be as helpful as possible, but it appears that the operators don’t really have much more information besides what was already shared. I ended up buying another shipping label, and emailed that with the updated consent forms, to [email protected] and [email protected].

Nov 21 – I received an email from VFS with a tracking ID and a message that the application has been dispatched to the IRCC office on the 22nd (?!?). Besides the fact that the email was sent about an action in the future, the message was cryptic and made little sense. I didn’t pay much attention to this and waited for further communication.

Nov 28 – After waiting for a week and not receiving an update, I begin to freak out and wonder if my passport has been misplaced. I reach out to VFS again, but they seem to not know anything more about this, just like before. The tracking number that I was provided failed to pull up anything of value, and I continually receive a “NO RECORDS FOUND” message while plugging it in on the VFS tracking website. The chat representative too is unable to pull anything up with the tracking ID and advises me to wait for a little longer. I also request for an update via email using the IDs mentioned earlier.

Nov 29 – I receive 5 automated email notifications from VFS, with messages ranging from “application is under process” to “your processed decision envelope has been dispatched from the IRCC Office” with incomplete date stamps. To double check, I went to the Canadian website where I initially started the application to see what was going on, and sure enough, I noticed that there was a “counterfoil” appended to both of our applications. A quick Google search revealed that this is the term that Govt. of Canada use to refer to the physical sticker affixed on the passport.

Nov 30 – A little before lunch, I received an email from [email protected] that says that my application has been updated. I log back into my account and notice no new messages. I suspect that this email was probably talking about the counterfoil that was appended to both of our applications, which I had already checked previously.

Meanwhile, the USPS label that I had created on Nov 6 starts posting activity (hurray!) I guess that means something is being shipped back to me. Since I had picked two day shipping, I don’t receive the package until today (Dec 3).

As I was not sure of when I will receive the passports back, I opted to hold for pickup on my return envelope when I created it. I rushed to the post office today and sure enough, received both our passports! I was elated and relieved at the same time, as this has been quite a trying time, with lots of worry and confusion about what exactly is going on.

I hope this helps anyone out there that is unsure of how the process works. I guess because of the transition starting November, there is a significant delay with the process and general misinformation. For eg., I read in multiple places that shipping labels only have a 2-week validity, but this isn’t always true. They used my old shipping label and it ended up routing correctly back to me. Be sure to confirm new information from a trusted source, and good luck!