Today was the day of the Citizenship test. I had myself reasonably well prepared but as I wrote before I’m not very good at studying dry facts. So I was a little bit nervous. The invitation mentioned I should take 3 hours for the test and you can ask a lot of questions in 3 hours.

First I had to wait in a waiting room with about 50 other people. Sitting there I noticed my nickname on the wall, right under the Coat of Arms of Canada. I had seen the Coat of Arms before, but had never read the Latin motto underneath it. It says “a mari usque ad mare”. It means “From sea to sea” and I interpreted it as a good sign.

We were then led into the test room, with rows of desks, all with a freshly sharpened pencil on top. One side for people that took the test in French and the other side for us English speakers. The test consisted of 20 questions of which I needed only 12 answer correctly. They were all really simple questions, and just reading the booklet would have been enough to answer them. One of them for example was: “What are the two official languages of Canada?”. On top of that they were multiple choice so I was finished in 5 minutes. For good times I went over all questions again but then I really had to hand in my answer paper. I would be surprised if I didn’t score 100%. I was the first to finish and then had to go to another room where after a short wait I was interviewed to see if my understanding of at least one of Canada’s official languages was sufficient. I started in Mandarin but then switched to Spanish.

The women checked if all the stamps in my passport matched the dates that I had indicated on my application form as dates I was outside Canada. They matched. Subsequently she asked some questions about my housing situation, sources of income, and if I had a partner and what his/her profession was. And then it was over and just 25 minutes after I had entered I was outside again, where it was still snowing.

In about 2 months I’ll have my swearing-in ceremony where I have to sing “O, Canada” and swear allegiance to the Queen. Better start practising:

Returning from the US I found an unexpected surprise on the doormat. A letter from Citizenship and Immigration Canada inviting me to do my citizenship test.

I hadn’t expected to receive this so soon, since the waiting time they indicate on their website is much longer. And a friend, who is also applying for citizenship, got his letter last week, but he started his application 3 months before me.

When I told the good news to friends one asked if I would lose my Dutch citizenship. “No, I won’t,” I replied but then he came back to me with a link to the website of the Dutch Immigration and Naturalization department, the Dutch version of Citizenship and Immigration Canada. The question is about dual citizenship and the last paragraph reads:

But what happens if Dutch citizens go to live abroad? In principle, they can renew their Dutch passport every ten years without difficulty. But when they adopt another nationality, they automatically lose their Dutch nationality.

That was quite alarming so I emailed the friend who’s also applying for citizenship the link. His wife replied quite soon with a link to another webpage, this one from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It says that Netherlands doesn’t allow dual citizenship but mentions 3 exceptions:

You will not lose your Dutch nationality:

a) if you were born in the country of your other nationality and have your principal residence there when you acquire the nationality of that country;
b) if, before you turned 18, you had your principal residence in the country of your other nationality for an uninterrupted period of five years;
c) if you are married to a person who possesses the nationality you wish to acquire.

Exception c) is clearly applicable in my case so I have nothing to worry about. However a bit later the article mentions this:

You have acquired another nationality and qualify as an exception. How can you prove this?

If you reapply for a Dutch passport at the Dutch embassy or consulate, you must state on the application form that you possess another nationality in addition to Dutch nationality. You must demonstrate when you acquired this nationality by submitting your naturalization certificate.

[…]

If you qualify under c. (you are married to someone with the nationality you have acquired), you will need your naturalization certificate, your marriage certificate and evidence that your spouse possesses the nationality you have acquired.

So it looks like I have to keep Alison alive until I die and we really have to stay married. My friend contacted the Dutch consulate and they told him this only applies for the first time you apply for a new passport. So I only have to keep Alison alive and/or keep our marriage afloat for the next couple of months. Then I just have to fill out a form and bring that in person to the Dutch consulate or embassy. I’ll make sure to do that.

But first I have to learn everything about Canada from the nice little booklet pictured above, A Look at Canada. It has been 25 years ago since the last time I did a test, and that was my Driving Test. I’m not very good at test taking (and especially not in learning ‘dry’ facts) so I hope I won’t fail. They will ask me questions like:

Which party is the official opposition at the federal level?
What is the name of your representative in your provincial Parliament?

Since my test will take place next Tuesday, the day after the announced non-confidence vote that will bring down our gouvernment and the day after our provincial elections that might bring a new representative, next wee’s answers to those questions might be different from now. We’ll see.

Now back to studying.

After yesterday’s Canadian elections (aiaiai, the Conservatives won a lot of seats) it is now time to pay our full attention to the presidential elections of the United States. The elections are three weeks away and Alison has already received her absentee ballot. Last time (4 years ago) she received her ballot 9 months too late. It had been “mistakenly” sent to St. Thomas, one of the US Virgin Islands and it took a very long while to finally reach us. And it didn’t even arrive in a bottle.

Anyway, Alison is a dual US-Canadian citizen and it’s time to vote. Just as with the Canadian election, her vote doesn’t really matter. I don’t think McCain has much chance winning in the state of New York, but if they’ll ever use the popular vote for statistics it might show up. If they actually open those absentee ballot envelopes. I heard they are only opened and counted if the outcome is too close to call.

Alison always lets me vote since I’m more au courant of the political news than she is. [Okay, that’s not true, and she wasn’t happy with it. See her comment below.] Not that the choice at hand is particularly difficult this time around.

But filling out the ballot actually is difficult. So maybe my American readers can help me. Let me explain. I’d have expected to find entries for the candidates of the parties on the ballot: Obama for the Democrats, McCain for the Republicans and maybe one or two others that are running as independents. But instead there are 10 choices for president and vice-president. (click on the picture above to read the entries)

McCain & Palin have three entries and Obama & Biden two, and then there are no less than 5 independent candidates, four I’ve never heard of and Ralph Nader.

But why does McCain/Palin have three boxes? So their chances would triple? To confuse the uneducated or first-time voter? I’m well educated and I do find it highly confusing.

Of course I’m going to vote for that one, but which box on the ballot should I check?

Should I choose: Democratic Electors for Obama/Biden or Working Families for Obama/Biden?

What is the difference? Will it affect the outcome of the election?

If you have the answer, please let me know in the comments. Thank you.

Nine months ago, in January, I was finally eligible to apply for Canadian citizenship. To be able to apply you need to have been exactly 3 years (1,095 days) physically in Canada, and since I was quite often in the Netherlands and the US after my immigration, it took some months after my 3 year anniversary for me to be eligible.

I filled out all the forms, paid a fee, made special pictures and wanted to send it off. The forms included a checklist and I duly checked all the items before putting them in the envelope.

Everything was there.

But wait, one of the items on the checklist said AND not OR.
So I needed two items of paperwork for that checkbox and I only had one.

The paper I was missing was my Record of Landing, a big, legal sized, piece of paper that they stapled into my passport when I arrived in Canada. They told me that I didn’t need that paper anymore because it was going to be replaced by a new, wallet-sized, Permanent Resident Card, that I had to buy for $100. That card indeed was sent to me a couple of months later and I removed the crumpled Record of Landing from my passport. I now was officially in Canada I thought, with a shiny ID-card with my photo on it.

But it turned out I really need that piece of paper, and that the Permanent Resident Card replacement is only for travel purposes, even though it is issued by the same organization that does the citizenship procedure, and there is no way I could have received that Permanent Resident Card without a Record of Landing.

So I paid another 30$ to get a duplicate Record of Landing. I filled out an application form and mailed it to the Citizenship and Immigration office in Montréal that handles duplicate forms.

And then the waiting began. After 2 months, in March, I thought it was taking an awful long time to make me a copy of a form so I call. They tell me that the processing time for duplicate forms is now 4 months, so I just have to wait.

After 5 months I get a letter. Ah, finally, my Record of Landing has arrived!
Nope, it is only a letter saying that my file has been sent to another office in Ottawa and the processing time will be 5 months.

I must say, they are quite fast in Ottawa, because it only took them 4 months to make me a photocopy of my Record of Landing and mail it to me. Tomorrow I’m going to make a photocopy of the photocopy and then I can finally sent my application to become a citizen of this fine country. A country were all official documents/applications/forms seems to be done on paper, and everything has to be processed by humans because none of the forms is machine readable. I fill out the forms on my computer and then I have to print them (and of course Adobe Acrobat spits out 5 copies) and someone on the other end has to enter all my info into another computer. This whole thing can be so much more efficient. It would save so much time and money. Why is Canada a third world country when it comes to bureaucracy?

When I looked first into this procedure, when I just had arrived in Canada, the processing time to become a Canadian citizen was 10 months. By the time I was eligible it was already 12 months, and now it is 15 months. So maybe in March 2009 I will become a Canadian citizen. And maybe not. Watch this space. Patiently.

This day a year ago we bought our house. Today is also the hearing in our rent-increase-case at the Régie du Logement. I amassed all the paperwork I needed to proof that the rent increase is justified and even dug up my dusty briefcase from a moving box in the basement. I was prepared.

The meeting was a disaster. One of our tenants showed up in person and started a litany on how bad the shape of their apartment was. She forgot to mention that I actually spend the most time fixing their apartment. Even though the judge told her to shut up since this hearing was not about that it set the tone. I was the evil landlord and the judge was clearly against me. She didn’t buy my argument that we should be able to include the cost we made installing an alarm system, since it lowered our insurance premium. She also didn’t want to look at the amount we actually pay for the insurance but copied the amount from the policy, which didn’t include 250 dollars tax and service charges.

I also needed additional documentation on the amount of taxes the previous owner paid, and gave me two weeks to cough up those documents.

One positive point: Our tenants probably have to to pay the cost of the review by the Régie.

I left quite discouraged but fortunately after a while that feeling went away. We’ll see what the outcome will be, and how much we can actually raise the rents.

[I’m too lazy to translate this. Try

for a computer translation.]

Zoals gezegd: veel kinderen.

[I’m too lazy to translate this. Try

for a computer translation.]

De mislukte fietsdemonstratie heeft wel de pers gehaald. De “Mirror” (een gratis wekelijkse krant) publiceerde een foto. Met mij erop. Een vriendin van Alison herkende me zelfs.

Hier is de foto op de Mirror website.

En het is prachtig weer buiten…

[I’m too lazy to translate this. Try

for a computer translation.]