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You expect big news to come with some fanfare: a ceremony, a uniformed worker appearing at your door, an express-delivered envelope with some kind of official seal on it.

Instead, the news I had been waiting nine years for arrived via email.

“Congratulations!” chirped the message that landed in my inbox at 1:42 p.m. on a Friday afternoon in June. “You are now a permanent resident (PR) of Canada!” And then it said the same thing again in French, because Canada.

My partner and I moved to Vancouver in 2017. The U.K. had felt like it was going downhill fast ever since Brexit had passed in 2015, and on a personal level, my then-girlfriend, now-fiancée, had struggled after coming out as trans. Accessing trans healthcare in England was almost impossible, and Canada seemed like a solution. So I got accepted to do a master’s degree at UBC, and the pair of us packed our lives into a total of four suitcases and left.

Leaving was the easy part. Staying was harder. And the more immigrants I spoke to, the more I realized my problems with the system were far from unique.

ADJUSTING TO A new country is hard—even for people from similar places. Miranda Blank, a video game producer originally from Seattle, reckons it took at least a year for her to start to feel settled in the city. “I’ve been pretty stable in Vancouver, which I wasn’t sure about when I first moved here,” she says. “Vancouver is quite a chilly city to get to know people—a lot of the friends that I’ve made are immigrants as well, and they have run into a lot of the same issues.”

In some ways, Blank’s immigration story was accidental. Her sister already lived in B.C., and she moved after a Canadian company hired her and sponsored her work permit in early 2021. She worked remotely while completing the necessary paperwork for entering the country—doing an English test, finding records of every border crossing, proving her college degree—and finally got her work permit issued in October. The company had an in-house lawyer, and she applied for permanent residency in January 2022 through the Provincial Nomination Program, a process she had started with the B.C. government the previous July.

Then, that April, she got fired.

Immigration is a complicated beast. There are different kinds of work permits, broadly “open” (which allow you to change jobs) and “closed” (which limit you to a single employer). Blank had a closed work permit, so while her original company had sponsored her permanent residency, her work permit was now invalid.

“I had to get a job really, really quickly again,” she recalls.

Luckily, she found and accepted a new job by mid-June—but it took time for the new work permit to come through. She applied for a work permit in August and had no idea how long it would take to receive it—meaning she was unable to start the job and ended up relying on her savings to get by.

The hardest part was not knowing when it would end.

“I was completely in limbo,” Blank reflects. “It felt like being in a holding pattern, and that has its own level of stress that comes with it… You don’t really have a good expectation of when things will come in and when you’ll be able to pick up the threads of where you were.”

I experienced a similar thing. After I graduated in 2019, my partner and I were on a post-graduation work permit that expired in June 2022. Unsurprisingly, COVID impacted my ability to find a full-time job, and I spent my years post-graduation stringing together freelance work and contracts that promised to turn into something permanent but never did.

Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government announced in April 2022 that work permits which expired that year would be extended, but only if you remained in Canada. So, after my work permit expired that June, I was stuck: unable to leave Canada, unable to work, unable to do anything but pay rent and hope for the best.

It took two months, when the application process actually launched that August, before I received an email that let me resume earning money. But I wasn’t issued a new permit—a piece of paperwork that, should I leave, would allow me to re-enter Canada as a worker—until that December.

While Blank was in her own bureaucratic purgatory, she similarly wasn’t supposed to leave the country. But she did anyway, to go see her family. That was when her work permit finally came through, in November 2022, meaning she had to get special dispensation to get back across the border to re-enter Canada with her new work permit.

Her permanent residency was processed not long after that.

After finding it hard to make friends, she took matters into her own hands: starting a book club, getting involved with indie video game events, and trying to make a city more like the one she wishes she’d found when she moved here.

While maybe it would have been easier to move back to the U.S., Blank is glad she stuck it out.

“If I had needed to move because the PR didn’t work out or the work permit didn’t work out or whatever, I would have if that was what I had to do,” she says. “But........

© Georgia Straight