How to complete your e-APR: the process from ITA to CoPR

Congratulations – you’ve been picked from the Express Entry pool and received an Invitation to Apply (ITA) for Canadian Permanent Residency!

… but how do you complete the application for permanent residency form (the e-APR)?

What supporting documents do you need to upload?

What should you expect from now until you finally arrive in Canada?

I’ll explain all in this article.

If you’re anything like me you’re super excited because you’ve received an Invitation to Apply and thinking surely I’ll just complete my e-APR and the rest will be fairly quick and straightforward.

Well, not to burst your bubble but… no… this next part is the slowest and most frustrating part of the whole saga that is Canadian Immigration! At points it can seem like your application has gone into a black hole from which it will never emerge, but don’t lose heart… it will happen, you just gotta hang in there.

I’ll explain in detail the process that our application took, but, every application is different and the process and time it takes from submitting your e-APR to complete is different. Our application took pretty much bang on six months to process from ITA to us receiving our Confirmation of Permanent Residency (CoPR) form (the documents we needed to fly to Canada). For most of those six months our application sat at “We are reviewing whether you meet the eligibility requirements” with no updates apart from at the beginning and right towards the end of the process.

All the time I was on message boards reading about seemingly hundreds of people who had sailed through the process in one month from receiving their ITA and what each tiny update on the system might mean, what IP1 and IP2 were and every other minutia of the process.

The best bit of advice I can give you… don’t torture yourself with it… assume that your application is going to take the maximum time that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) says (which unfortunately is open ended just now because of COVID-19), check in on the Express Entry portal regularly to see if anything is needed from you, and that’s it… just wait. Frustrating I know, but honestly, you’re not going to help yourself by over analysing every step.

With all that said, here’s my overview of what our process was…

Step 1: Complete and submit the e-APR and supporting documents

Once you receive an Invitation to Apply (ITA as it’s referred to by IRCC) the next step is to complete a full electronic application, known as an e-APR, and upload a ton of supporting documentation.

You only have 60 days to do this and some of the documentation you need can take a while to get hold of so it’s really important that you get moving on the documents immediately.

Your ITA and the Express Entry portal will explain exactly what documentation is required and what you need to do to get them as this will vary slightly from person to person depending on the details you provided in your Express Entry profile. But as an example the screenshot below is what our document request section in the Express Entry portal looked like.

There are a number of documents that will likely be required regardless of the specifics of your application that you need to get moving on. These are outlined below.

Key supporting documents for Express Entry PR application:

The electronic application (e-APR) form itself shouldn’t present any problems, just obviously take it slow and make sure you’re accurate with the information you provide.

There’s a bunch more supporting documents you’ll need to upload, some of which you’ll have already obtained for your initial application to the Express Entry pool.

You will need to combine several different document pictures into one file upload. For example, in the screenshot above there’s only one file upload accepted for the “Education” supporting document line. But in that upload there need to be a few different types of document (as per the screenshot below).

So, given the amount of supporting documents you’ll be uploading, one tip I would give you here is to make sure that you structure your uploads logically to make it as easy as possible for the IRCC officer to understand what they’re looking at.

What we did for each file upload was to make the first page a contents page. For example, in the evidence of education upload my first page looked like the picture below.

Then the following pages then had all the actual supporting documents.

The person reviewing your application should see that you’ve put in effort to make their life easy and to want to pass you – so get them on side as best you can. If they can’t immediately understand what they’re looking at then you’ve not done it right.  

I’ve created a checklist to show you a good way to structure your supporting documents for each section. It’s the structure we used for our application and shows you what you should be aiming for. Just provide your email and name in the box below and we’ll email you the eBook.

Once you’ve pulled together everything you need and completed the e-APR, submit it in the Express Entry Portal.

You should then receive an “Acknowledgement of Receipt” (AoR) pretty soon after submitting the application.

We submitted the application through the portal and received an AoR the same day – this didn’t really say anything other than ‘we’ve received your application and will now review it in line with our standard processing times’.

Step 2: Submit your biometrics

Almost a month after we had submitted our e-APR and received our AoR we got an electronic letter through the Express Entry Portal asking us to submit biometrics.

Again the letter will outline exactly what you need to do but for us it was straightforward: we went to a third party immigration centre in the city where we were living and submitted our fingerprints which automatically get uploaded to IRCC.

About a week after submitting the biometrics, the status in the portal changed to show that they’d received our biometrics.

Step 3: Pass the medical exam

Around the same time, a month after submitted the e-APR, the medical results status in the Portal changed to show that we’d passed the medical exam.

This is the medical exam you arranged as soon as you received your Invitation to Apply.

Step 4: Wait, for a long time…

Everything seemed to be moving fairly quickly up until this point, but after we’d done the biometrics and passed the medical exam… nothing tangible happened for months.

The “Review of eligibility” box just sat at ‘We are reviewing whether you meet the eligibility requirements’ with nothing changing. In fact this part didn’t update until the very end when a final decision had been made.

Around 5 and a half months after submitting our e-APR I was going a bit crazy with the waiting and no information (we’d quit our jobs in London already and were haemorrhaging cash – I do not recommend this approach!) so I called up IRCC to check what the status was. I was on hold for an hour and a half but to my surprise they were actually really helpful.

They told me that everything had completed apart from the background checks and they didn’t know how long that would be as a third party conducts those checks and all they see is a result come back (pass or fail) – they just have to wait for an answer.

This was both reassuring and worrying in equal measure, there’s no time limit on how long the background check can take… so back to the waiting game.

I’ll reiterate what I said earlier in the article, this is the stage that you just, unfortunately, need to be patient and stay positive (I should have followed my own advice!). Things will be happening behind the scenes but it is painfully slow.

Step 5: Request for Passports

Finally, in month six (seven since we’d received the ITA), we hit the milestone of being asked to submit our passports!

This is the last step before they issue the Confirmation of Permanent Residency (CoPR) form.

Obviously fantastic news, but I have to say this was probably where things got really confusing.

It seems from here, more than ever, people’s experiences vary a lot. But for us it went like this:

We got an email, and I do mean email, not an electronic letter or message through the portal, but an actual email to our personal email account saying that our application for permanent residence of Canada was almost complete and that we now needed to complete the steps outlined in the email within 30 days.

I was really suspicious of the email, given that IRCC say they’ll only every communicate through messages in the portal and the email itself was really confusing and poorly written – I was concerned this was some sort of phishing attempt.

After some pretty thorough digging though, I figured out it actually was for real.

So once we’d figured out the email was genuine, we had to try and decipher what it was asking us to do – it was so unclear and vague.

But after a couple of phone calls to IRCC and the Canadian High Commission, we figured out that basically we had to post one photocopy of our passports and two photos of ourselves to the Canadian High Commission in London. Which is what we did.

So at the ‘request for passports’ stage I would definitely recommend you follow the advice you’re given and if any of it is unclear, telephone the relevant party to confirm exactly what you need to do.

You really don’t want to go wrong at this stage!

Step 6: Confirmation of Permanent Residence

About a week and a half after we’d posted the passports, we got the Confirmation of Permanent Residence (CoPR) document in the post. This is what you need to be able to fly to Canada and complete the final step in the immigration process to become a permanent resident of Canada.

DO NOT sign the CoPR document just now – you will sign it with the Canada Border Services Agent when you land in Canada.

Now it’s time to start arranging your travel to Canada and start pulling together the documents you need when you landed. You can read all about the documents you require when you land in my overview here.

Step 7: Fly to Canada

The day you’ve been waiting for to begin the new chapter in your lives!

It will seem like you’ve come a long way since receiving your Invitation to Apply and completing that e-APR, and you are so almost there, but there’s one last step to complete when you arrive in Canada before you are officially a Canadian Permanent Resident.

Read what this is in our complete guide to what happens when you arrive in Canada for the first time.

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So that’s my overview to give you an idea of what to expect.

As I said, everyone’s experience will vary so I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

What’s been your experience so far?

Do you want more information on a certain phase?

Drop me a comment and let me know.