Hi, I received my CoPR recently and my land by date is July 2020. My passport expiry data is also July 2020. I want to renew my passport. I plan to do my landing in June 2020. Will this create any issues as I have the Canada visa stamp in my old passport? The CoPR letter also references my old passport number. Do I have to notify CIC? Thanks for your help.
If you change your passport, that’s a major change and you will have to notify CIC using web form. I’m not sure if they issue new CoPR and visa or let you land on the old one.
Why not land sooner and renew passport later?
Hello @rook, my wife was in the same situation as you. We had to travel to India for a wedding and then had to get a new US visa stamp before coming into the US. Since her passport was expiring she chose to get it renewed before we left for the trip.
We had a very interesting experience at the Delhi Airport, we were flying to Calgary via Amsterdam on KLM and the gate agents weren’t able to issue her a boarding pass, the issue as they explained to us was that they weren’t able to scan her expired passport (as that was punched and returned back to her by the Indian consulate in NYC) and the corresponding immigrant visa. As a result they weren’t initially able to issue her a boarding pass. The issue was escalated and the airlines contacted the Canadian immigration call center to verify the legitimacy of the visa.
While this check was ongoing we encountered some shady characters from Punjab who were attempting to travel to Canada on fraudulent visas. The airlines was denying them boarding and seeing all of this my wife panicked and was in tears.
Eventually the airlines was able to get through to the Canadian immigration who validated her visa and the airlines then did a manual override to issue her a boarding pass for the first leg to Amsterdam. At Amsterdam they had to do another manual override to issue her the boarding pass to Calgary.
At YYC, we had no issue whatsoever the IRCC officers only wanted to see her expired passport that had the immigrant visa and didn’t care about the new one. We were promptly landed and completed formalities like the goods to follow etc.
So the TLDR version is that you’ll be fine eventually, however depending on the airlines and the agents you encounter you may have to wait a bit. Give yourself plenty of time to make the flight.
The other alternative that you have is to contact IRCC and then they’ll ask you to send your old and new passports and will send you an new COPR and immigrant visa on the new passport. There may be a small fees for it, I think CanadaVisa.com has more information about this if you’re interested.