The Canadianification Continues
Covid vaccines became available to the over 37s in the UK today. I was booked in by 8:44am, getting jabbed next Thursday, May 27. By the time I go home in July I’ll be something like 70% covered, and my parents will be both fully dosed. It’s very much time that I got out of this living room. That is also my dining room. That is also my office. That is also, currently, my bedroom.
I applied for an Irish passport for my noisy new son just before Christmas at the end of 2020, approximately a day and a half before the country went into “Level 5” lockdown. This meant that, while things like off-licenses could open, nobody could go anywhere near the passport office for fear of contagion. I emailed Simon Coveney. He didn’t reply. So there my own passport, as part of this application, sat on a shelf for five months, while my Canadian permanent residence application sat on similar shelf somewhere in Sydney, Nova Scotia. A place I will almost certainly never visit. I put “Level 5” in quotes above (and I guess in this sentence also), because the passport office claimed they wouldn’t re-open until the country went to “Level 4”. Regardless, at some point in April, Ireland started re-opening some things, but as far as I could tell, nobody mentioned levels ever again. So there it sat for another month until someone shrugged their shoulders and missed leaving their house enough to pop in and put it in the post for me.
My Canadian process continues next Wednesday when I go in to get a medical checkup that’s pretty much just taking my blood pressure, weight and looking at me really closely in the eye for a few minutes and then taking £330 out of my bank account. It’s really an impressive racket they’ve got going on. Then I have an appointment a couple of hours later to give them my fingerprints and retinal scan and, who knows, a DNA sample. I realise I’ve never looked up if this costs money, but I’ve been presuming it doesn’t.
They recently asked for proof of Canadian citizenship for my child. The portal will only accept a single document. I have two children. One of them has a Canadian passport that we included in the original application and the other doesn’t have citizenship yet because he’s seven months old and Canada takes 15 months to process a citizenship application.