Thread: Hello ex-pats

I am looking for help or advice, It is my intention to emigrate to canada I am not married and have no kids I work for the Royal fleet and spend 4 months at sea and 3 months off I intend to keep my job and live in canada on my time off, how do I go about achieving this ??? every site I look on insists you must have a job in canada am really confusd please help!!!!

Welcome to Brits-abroad Joel. Hopefully there will be some-one along soon that can answer your questions.
I was with the R F A many years ago when i was in my 20's. Sailed out of Gosport UK.

well things are a bit different now although we occasionally sail from gosport most sail from scotland and portland now what ships were you on? is this your site?

The last one was Tidespring, well before your days tho Joel.

truely sir

Hi There Joels, Canadian immigration rules is that you must spend 3 years in a 5 year period, so if you want to do 3 months/year you would not meet that quota.

My advice is anyway, keep your good job in the uk, and just come here on your visitor's visa, you have 6 months on it anyway.

Trust me, Canada is a lovely place, people are all freindly and all, but living & working here is the pits. Been living just outside Vancouver for nearly 13 months now, and it is more expensive than London!! the work is slowing right down too.

So if I was in your shoes, single and all, I would sure travel around first! and if you can stand the heat & humidity try the phillipines to live! find yourself a lovely gal there and marry her! i work with a guy who married a phillipinee, but they 'stupidly' live in canada, they say i could have lived like a king with the 'mere' $250,000 i invested in canada... oh well... :-)

this amount gets you nowt in canada, 2 bed appartments in vancouver start around $700,000 and that would be in a slum end!

so there you go m8, if you do need more info on immigration to canada though, visit http://www.canada.org.uk/ they have the very latest there.

If you want some further advice like cost of living etc, for the Vancouver & fraser valley area, feel free to ask!

Emigrating is not just the pretty mountains, the landscapes and facilites, you have to live & work here, and it is not any different from the problems back home in the UK or any other country come to it. And it gets up my worked up when I look through these forums about emigrating, and people post replies to say they all think it is a bed of roses from day 1, like, oh it wonderful, come on over here you will love it etc, etc, yes it is all lovely true, but people need to know the nitty gritty stuff too!

I took me 4 years to get my visa for canada, i am a tradesmen too! we thought we had researched and researched exhaustively into emigrating to canada, and we was well prepared for it. I have travelled and moved houses a lot arounf the uk & europe for 20 years, so we thought it would be a piece of cake! but canada has been a real eye opener i can tell you.

i have to take my hat off to canadians, they work really hard, most of them holding down 2 jobs to make ends meet, they work very long hours too. so i don't know where this so called laid back lifestyle that many candians suppose to have, is?

so think hard about it first, if you can get a short term visa to work it would be a good way to sample the life here. good luck to ya

Hi there, good luck in whatever you want to do. And just a point to Arrkid, I dont think everyone looks at Canada as a bed of roses, I really dont think that we are all stupid! and not everyone wants to come on these sites and hear ex-pats grumbling (sorry Arrkid!). People that emigrated to Canada and then don't like it, can at least say that they tried it hey. And you could always come back if you really want!!! From Melsnco who have just sent off all applications for probably a 4 year wait too!!! and would love to be the one over in Canada grumbling instead of here wishing I had given it a go much sooner.

Hi Sheena! thanks for welcoming me to BA.

Is this your site, has i see you as the senior member? great site anyway.

mark

Hi Melsnco, Yes I agree with you I was grumbling on a bit there, I was having another bad day! I should have made my comments more neutral, I have just had so much bad luck since I have been here in Canada and I hope your experiences will be better! I certainly didn’t intend to imply all people are stupid, however though I am afraid a minority are! I will give you an example: my very best friends emigrated to Australia with their 2 kids (15 & 10 yrs olds), just before we came to Canada, they too like everyone on these forums had one thing in common – they was sick and tired of UK.. so they embarked on a dream of emigrating to Oz, and they researched on the internet about the place and thought yes that’s the place for us and carried on with their PR application – their mistake? They never ever visited the country – now that’s stupid!

Now I don’t like to use that ‘S’ word, so I will call it the ‘N’ word for Naïve, and there is plenty of people like my friends out there!

They just wanted the hell out of the UK; and you have to admire them for that though. So they went in blindfolded really, they just had their ‘dream’ based on the internet. And they had the toughest time ever, and their marriage was almost on the rocks, but I am glad to say it was the kids that pulled them through the darkness and although they are not exactly happy with area they are living in oz, they have been there 2 years now and making a good go of it and may relocate somewhere nicer there. The moral of the point here is: please visit the country at least 2 times ( 1 in winter season at least too!), speak with local people, not just people who serve you in the restaurants and shops, they are going to be super nice because they want to have a nice tip! Drive round a neighbourhood and stop and talk to someone, they won’t mind at all, they will be only too happy to tell you things (good & bad), and basically do more research. We did 1 trip to Canada first before the application and 2 during it. So we knew what we were getting into, but I wished we had gone down to street level and asked about basic things like utility bills etc, etc. don’t be afraid to ask!

Now I see from your other postings your hubby is into flooring, well there is a construction boom in BC at the moment (mainly because of the winter Olympics in 2010), but unfortunately it will be over in the next 4 years I am afraid, and your wait for your pr will probably take that. Now someone mentioned to you about an immigration seminar near you, I suggest you get your asses over there and speak to someone in the trades section. I went to one of these sessions in London about 2.5 years ago, and I wished I went to one earlier! If a particular trade is in demand by one of these companies can ‘fast track’ your pr application and get you over there in months!! I am electrician and I could have gone the following week I spoke to the guy! – Great - I wished I knew about this before!, but my application was well into this system now and I wasn’t ready anyway.

These seminars are well worth the money, and it is surprising how ‘jammed packed’ they are - that tells you something eh?

Also you say you prefer to come to BC, now I have nicked name BC for ‘Bring Cash’ – and bloody plenty of it! J
But seriously though, it is very expensive, you may not think so because of your ‘English’ cash conversion, but once the English money has dried out, you are then earning Canadian wages, and then you will realise it is expensive – trust us on this one.

You say you are going to Kelowna on your trip here soon? Well that’s the up and coming area at the moment; - I know this because my boss deals a lot there. And the climate is much better than Vancouver and surrounding areas. We live near Abbotsford in the Fraser valley, and again trust me on this, it rains more here than it does in UK, in fact my mom has been here twice to visit us now and she has called the area ‘MANCHESTER’ – I say no more!

Anyway I better get off to work, it’s 7:30am now, I am putting a little guide together about things you need to do before we left UK like banking, insurance etc, bringing pets, to things like health care and stuff over here in Canada.

Just to finish off today, I would certainly not put anyone off coming here, just be careful of the pitfalls that all, there is a lot of rouge people here too after your cash and your sanity! Any questions feel free to ask!


:wub:

Wow Mark that was a mouthfull and one hell of a long post.
Your right tho, you must at least visit the country of your
choice for a good month if not longer before you make any
decisions to emigrate there.

Oh and one more thing, WELCOME to Brits Abroad Mark.