One of our clients filed a PR card renewal application. He met the days i.e. a minimum of 730 in the past five years. However, part of the basis for his meeting the minimum 730 day threshold included being employed full-time abroad for a Canadian based company – in other words, working full-time for a Canadian company outside of Canada and hence having less than 730 days of physical presence in Canada. This adds complexity to a PR card renewal, especially if contrasted to a simple case where a person was clearly living, working , spending money Canada for two years (this latter scenario being easily presented by submitting, for example, proof of pay stubs from a Canadian employer).
Canada’s immigration officers are instructed to view the full-time Canadian employment abroad exemption with much scepticism, or are at least instructed to assess such applications carefully, in a more time-consuming manner. The time-consuming assessment entails a CIC officer asking for a residency questionnaire (which includes a request for irrelevant information such as where a person has been residing after the initial filing of the PR Card renewal application). In addition, besides asking for a residency questionnaire, there is an easy way for an officer to delay the processing of an application – starting the sort of Merry-Go-Round of an officer requiring an applicant to meticulously file a big package of forms and supporting documents at the start of a case, and then a different officer requesting the documents again (when in fact, in many cases such as citizenship applications, no officer has not even looked at the initial package of forms/documents).
An applicant for a PR card renewal who has worked for a Canadian-based company and shares the same ethnicity of the Canadian employer will face more obstacles in renewing a PR card. (e.g. a Chinese PR card holder being employed by a Chinese-Canadian company, being despatched to work in China).
By contrast, a visitor visa exempt PR card holder (e.g. citizens of the USA, Australia, New Zealand, the UK and some of the EU) are generally subject to less scrutiny when renewing their permanent resident cards even if they are working for a Canadian company outside of Canada. Such TRV exempt persons are relieved of the obligation to file a travel document application if their permanent resident Card has expired, by simply entering Canada on the strength of their visitor-visa exempt passport. As a consequence, the likelihood of such persons losing their permanent resident status is significantly lower than those persons whose passports are associated with requiring a visitor visa to Canada.
Those PR card applicants who end up applying for a travel document at a visa office outside of Canada (due to their failure to possess a 1st world passport) most often lose their permanent resident status upon rejection of the travel document application and must make their case to regain their permanent resident status at the Immigration Refugee Board (IAD).
