We arrived via PAL on March 29, 2015, 8:10pm PST (left March 29 11:45pm PHL time). We arrived on time, alighted the plane, took a family picture (haha), with the waterfall just before the immigration area, then went straight to the Immigration Counter. We were the 3rd one in the line, the officer asked us our purpose of visit, we told them for landing, as new immigrants, he then proceeded on asking us if we have been to a country that had Ebola in the last 2 weeks, we said no. After typing in our info in his computer, he asked us to proceed to the new immigrants area (just right of the immigration counter). Someone welcomed us and said that the flight that we took was a new flight, just opened the week before and that is why they had a shift after 8pm, normally, they are open only until 8pm. The area was almost empty and very quiet, until our kids went in 😛
The officer then proceeded to tell us info that we already know (from the seminars that we attended in Manila), but we listened anyway. She asked hubby (the principal applicant) if he wants to attend a focus group that is going to be conducted in the next few weeks, for new immigrants, about their services, he signed up. She then gave us a piece of paper with links that are useful, and told us what to do first. We didn’t get to process our Social Identification Number (SIN) in the airport because it was already after 8pm. She then told us to proceed to the next step, which is processing/checking of the Confirmation of Permanent Residence (COPR). The officer there just asked us if we were married, if it’s our first time in Canada, if we have an address where they can send the Permanent Resident (PR) card, how many kids we have and then asked us to sit down and wait for him to call us again. We waited for 10 minutes , he called us again to the counter and asked us to sign our COPR and we’re done. We presented our goods to follow list (we didn’t give our goods to declare list), and ask for him to stamp it, he told us there’s no need, we asked again, to confirm, since we are worried that we might be taxed. He then told us, if it’s personal items and are not brand new things, we won’t be taxed.
We then went out and got our luggage (3 balikbayan boxes and 5 luggage), queued up and gave our declaration form (we declared unaccompanied goods and amount of more than $10k), but we were not asked to line up in the customs area, the person who took our declaration form just waved us off and asked up to proceed to the exit. (By the way, I brought my CPU, 2 hard drives and some flash drives, they didn’t asked us to open any.)
Total time from alighting from the plane to leaving the airport building, a little less than a hour, we breezed right through!
Observations: That red-eye flight of PAL seems to work to our advantage, there was no long line. The downside is we needed to go to Service Canada along Cooney road to process our SIN, which was 30 minutes waiting time.
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