The male side of my family has always had a good dose of "wanderlust". My brother and his family settling in Australia and my father, after many years working in Canada, retiring to British Columbia. For many years I have spent wonderful and relaxing holidays visiting both of them.

After a holiday in 2005 visiting my father on Vancouver Island I started to look seriously at emigrating to Canada, and started researching what was involved in starting my life anew in another country.

Whilst driving home from work one day I noticed a banner on the road side advertising an immigration seminar to be held the following week and decided to "go for it" and attend.

That was March 2005, two and a half years later, £3,800.00 poorer and our skilled workers visas are in the short queue ready to be processed by the Canadian High Commission.

Once we had signed up with the consultants they sent us a very extensive list of documentation that may be required by the CHC. This included family history, educational qualifications, job references, the list goes on...

It took us about ten months of pushing H.R. departments of previous employers, contacting schools for the certificates that we never thought we would need again, spending days trying to contact "great aunt Gladys" to find her date of birth. But, finally, we got all of the information together and posted it to our consultants.

The consultant checked it all and then submitted it to the CHC who duly returned a file number and put our documents into the queue with thousands of other applications.

During the next couple of years we travelled to Canada on "fact finding" and "job interview" holidays and I made several contacts that would be willing to help me get a job when I got over there. We also started to catalogue our posessions, what we wanted to take with us, what we didn't need and thought we could sell through eBay and what we would have to give or throw away. We stopped buying electrical goods and tried to manage with the same car (no H.P. agreements), etc.

Then the "Credit Crunch of 2007 - 2008" started to bite so we put the house up for sale in the hope that we would not be put into negative equity and not have enough money to support us when we finally got to Canada.

After five months, two viewings and three price drops we got an offer on the house and that same day we had a letter from our consultants asking us to update our documentation as the CHC was ready to process our application. We agreed a "move" date and had three weeks to sell the house, liquidate all of the assets we were not taking to Canada and sort out all of the documentation, get the criminal record checks, up to date photographs, etc. It was tough be we managed it, just.

It took just under four months for the CHC to complete the processing for our application, then we got a letter from them waiving the interview and requesting that we take our medical examinations. Not wanting to slow the process down we immediately booked ourselves in at the immigration clinic in Birmingham.

The medicals were fairly straight forward although very stressful for us. I think the doctors are used to elevated blood pressures for these exams as a lot of "white coat" syndrome creeps in and all of the applicants are stressed to some degree. The exams took about three hours all told, although there was a lot of time spent in the waiting room. We managed to achieve scores of "A" and a "B" on the medicals and the immigration doctor said there shouldn't be any problems with our heath.

The medicals took longer than expected with a couple of extra tests needing to be done. These were completed in the last week of December 2008 and were sent to the CHC in mid January.

It wasn't long after that when we got the letter we'd been waiting for, a request from the CHC for our UK passports. We opted for the quicker route which was to go down to London and deliver the passports by hand, which we did on the 19th of February 2009.

We waited aprehensively for the two weeks and then made another trip down to London to pick our passports up. The relief we felt when we got the passports back and looked inside to find the immigrant visas was immense.

The next three weeks were chaotic with sorting out transport for the dogs, packing up all of the belongings that we were taking to Canada and putting them into the removal van, organising the flights and travel insurance, leaving work and friends, everything went by in a blur. The last four nights were constantly going to farewell parties and tearful good byes and then it was the final day and we were at the airport, tickets in hand, ready to start our new lives in Canada.

Although using an immigration consultancy is not for everyone, as they are expensive, I think that, for us, it was a good move. It helped us with all of the paperwork and allowed us to put a better case to the CHC than we would have done on our own. Immigration has a habit of taking over your life, especially if there is a long wait for the outcome, and to fail the processing stage of the immigration process because you have not got all of the information that they require would be heart breaking.

During my research I have compiled a useful web sites and am currently researching a checklist of things that may need to be addressed before we leave the UK and after we arrive in Canada.

If you have any web sites that may be of interest, any information that would help others or if you want to add your story to my web site then e-mail me at [steve@spstreet.net].

Milestone	Description
April 2005	Signed up with our consultant and started gathering information.
February 2006	All the paperwork was handed over to the CHC and we joined the queue for processing.
April 2008	We got the 90 day notification for updating the information prior to "processing".
May 2008	We sent the updated information to the CHC ready for processing.
September 2008	Notification for medical examinations.
September 2008	Medicals have been done and the "Right of Permanent Residency" fees paid.
December 2008	Extra medicals requested.
January 2009	Extra medicals sent to the CHC.
February 2009	The CHC's request for our passports.
March 2009	Visas received.
March 2009	We finally arrive in Canada.