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It has taken about five years, but members of my family have, this week, become Permanent Residents of Canada. The transition was clean, friendly, and an incredible if long-in-the-making relief.

Our immigration lawyer regards all his client families as long-term friends, and although each case is different they all take more time than everyone expects them to take. No doubt our application had complications that other families do not encounter; and, no doubt, there were circumstances that we did not have to face...thank goodness!

The whole transition from the West Coast of the US to Vancouver Island began with concern for our daughter's education. The schools in Oregon - at least in our area at the time, and I suspect in general - are an abysmal failure from Middle School on. No doubt our daughter would have been at the top of the academic pile through High School and, probably, through the Oregon University system. That is not what we wanted for her and, it seems, it is not what she expects of herself.

We were lucky in the respect of mobility, with location imposing no employment constraint. Most people cannot say that, and while Canada has been approving people for permanent residency based, in one category, on worker skills and academics, that approach has now been changed. The Government has wisely decided that bringing immigrants into the country is foolish if there is no work for them. Now employers can get Work Permits for virtually any category of employment. Once those employees have been in the country for two years they are eligible to apply for permanent residency – and that work permit period is being reduced to one year. Makes total sense: if you have job vacancies, you can fill them without the virtual slavery that the H1-B visa can represent.

The switch in categories for permanent residency may not make the process any faster, but it does remove a number of obstacles.

After leaving Canadian Immigration offices this last week, we went on to Service Canada – a one-stop shopping stop for just about anything associated with employment and employment-related issues – to apply for permanent Social Insurance Numbers for my spouse and myself, and for a brand new number for our daughter, who has been antsy about getting summer employment. Her file created a hiccup…

If I write my name "McGoldrick" or "Mc Goldrick" it is fairly easy to see the difference in the printed typeface. It is not as easy to casually notice in machine-readable code. In her US Passport, there it is: “Mc Goldrick.” That code was read by the Canadian Consulate in Buffalo, NY, and thus her Immigrant Visa reads “Mc Goldrick” as well. Now her SIN will read “Mc Goldrick” for the rest of her working and retirement life! Well, until or unless she changes her name upon marriage or wades into the bureaucratic morass at some future time to pursue a correction.

I must say, that hiccup, after five years of forms, photos, fingerprints, lost files, etc, caused an absolute wrenching in my stomach – as if everything was going to tumble down and send us back to square, all over again. But, no: no worries. This is Canada, and the Civil Servants smile and get it done.

When did you last see that at a California DMV?