Hello,

I am an Indian passport holder currently in Montreal on a one year Canadian work permit, which expires on April 14th, 2009. My employer has extended my job for another year, and I need to apply for a work permit extension with CIC.

Since my Indian passport expires by November 2009, I needed to get a renewed passport for submitting my work permit extension application until April 2010. So I have submitted my passport for renewal at HCI Ottawa in the last week of January. The official at the counter told me that it can take two months for the new passport, since they are implementing the new machine-readable passports. And my current original passport also was held back, saying that they are going to cancel that one.

In this situation, I had some questions -

1) The CIC website says 'If your current temporary resident status is still valid you can apply for an extension of your stay providing you apply at least 30 days before the expiry date of your current status.' This means that I should submit my application to CIC before March 14th. So if I do not recieve my new passport by then, can I submit the application with old passport information?

2) My old original passport is with HCI Ottawa currently. Can I request it back, as I might have to travel to the US in couple of weeks? Will it still be possible to travel with that passport, until I get the new one?

) CIC currently takes around 2 months for processing work permit extensions. So is it OK for me to continue working in Canada after April 14th, even while CIC is processing my extension application?

Thanks in advance for your inputs.

Bumping up the thread....

Any expert suggestions on this will be greatly appreciated. Thank You!