Getting (and tracking) your PR Card after landing in Canada

Your PR card is the most important document as a Canadian permanent resident. It is universally accepted as an ID proof, on par with a birth certificate or passport used by Canadian citizens. It can be used to avail all government services. 

When you land in Canada and speak to the CBSA, once they sign your COPR and you become permanent residents, they will ask you to provide an address to which IRCC can send the PR Card (one for each member of the family). What happens behind the scenes is that they submit a PR card application to IRCC on your behalf, using the address you provide and the details and photo present in the COPR copy that they retain. If you do not have a friend or family member's address you can provide to the CBSA, they will give you a form to submit later once you have a stable address for your PR card.


Getting your PR card can be pretty anxiety inducing if you are the overthinking type as it is essential to be able to travel outside Canada (to re-enter Canada as a permanent resident, you need either a PR card or a PR travel document, which you need to apply separately to the IRCC for). Getting your PR card also gets you some benefits such as easy ID, and apps like Canoo (Android) for getting free access to wonderful places like the Royal Ontario Museum, the Ontario Art Gallery, and so on, with exclusive discounts and offers as well. 

A screenshot of the Canoo app



IRCC posts 80th percentile processing times here but that isn't really useful to you - in a culture where we expect our online orders to give a nice notification when it's shipped, a P80 processing time does not help.

Thankfully, it is possible to track when your PR card application has been shipped. To do this, you need to login to IRCC via GCKey portal (any account, not necessarily yours)

Select link your application to your account as seen here on the applications page:


Now you need to enter the details exactly without a single missing field (some are tricky)




  • Select Permanent Resident Card under Category
  • Select Family Name, Given Name, Date of Birth - enter these details exactly as given in your passport. You can also choose Unique Client Identifier (UCI) and family name if you wish - your UCI should be present in all correspondence with the IRCC and your PR application.
  • City/town of birth is where most people go wrong with this process. You need to enter this exactly as in your passport, with a space after the comma (,) if present.
    • Ex - "Kolkata, West Bengal" or "Mumbai, Maharashtra" - put exactly what is given as place of birth in your passport, with state name if present, and don't forget to put a space after the comma and capitalize
  • Fill in your country of birth and country of citizenship, and marital status as provided on your IRCC application 
  • Date you become a permanent resident is the date on which you landed in Canada - this should be given in your Confirmation of Permanent Residence paper (COPR). It is the date in the port of entry. 

If you are successful, once you click search for my application, IRCC will say that they have found an application matching the details provided, and ask if you wish to link. Once linked, you can see the status (submitted / approved/ shipped etc) and once it has been shipped (via Canada post) you can expect it in a few days to week, depending on the distance between you and your primary visa office (PVO).

If it says no application found, you have most likely made a mistake in your City/Town of birth and the CBSA officer might have entered it differently in the system - try alternate spellings and hope you have some luck.

That's it - using this process, we were able to track when our PR cards were dispatched, and we asked our friends to check their mailbox a few days later, and got exciting news from them. 

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