Receiving the Letter of Approval

Oktober 2008 - Whoop .... there it is! "Congratulations" it states on top of the Letter of Approval. And, as expected, in the cover letter a request to send even more documents – to Berlin this time. After a short inventory, it seems we already needed most of these documents for the previous application and we´re allowed to reuse those. The only new thing are the Certificates of Good Conduct (police certificates).

The Dutch police certificates had already been ordered by us at the County Office at the beginning of October. This wasn´t the official way, they actually had to be sent to the embassy first. But since we persuaded the county clerk to switch things around, we saved ourselves a few days of waiting.

For the US police certificate I printed a set of official FBI documents from the internet, went to a nearby police station to have my fingerprints taken and sent it off to Quantico. If all goes well it should take 2 to 4 months to have them returned.

We figured that was all, but – surprise, surprise – then we received a letter from the embassy in Berlin, stating they were to start with the assessment of our national application within 60 days. If we could please let them know if were still interested in moving to Canada. Eh, well yeah! But we also have a provincial application running.

So we contacted the embassy and asked them the following questions:
1. Could we stop with the national program, and use the required fees we had already paid for the provincial program?
2. Could we, to not further delay our application, send the Certificates of Good Conduct at a later stage?

And the answer was yes! So on Friday October 23rd we send the complete package to Berlin including the big, fluorescent green sticker that said "Manitoba Provincial Nominee".

Yeeha!