A Day at the Consulate

The French Consulate in Vancouver is located at 1100-1130 West Pender St. and is where Vancouver mainland residents must make their visa applications (only those who live far have the option to apply by mail. Residents of other parts of Canada should check with their consulate because the instructions might be different).

Very important...
1) The visa application for Canadian citizens holding a valid Canadian passport is the one under the Canada-France Youth Exchange Agreement. This visa is valid for 90 days only and for only one visit to another Schengen country and includes any stop in transit to France. This also means that you should apply for your Carte de Sejour as soon as possible after you arrive, because it is the Carte de Sejour that actually permits your residency in France.

2) The consulate is open to the public from only 9:30AM to noon (and by appointment afterward). And stops accepting visa applications at 11:45AM, or earlier if it is busy.

3) Go over the checklist of requirements for the visa application very carefully. The tolerance for missing documents and sloppy applications is, understatedly, unwelcome. Make sure the pictures conform to the specifications - a ruler was pulled out.

4) There was no processing fee for this application.

Applying for a visa with a student loan.
One of the requirements of the visa is to be able to demonstrate that the applicant will have the equivalent of 600 euro (or something like that) for each month that they are staying in the country. Normally, only three options are offered by the consulate, a problem for students planning to apply for loans is that choosing any of them may cause eventual headaches if s/he ends up being audited - Linda Hallam at the student loan office pointed this out to me. If you are a seat-edge living type, this may not be a concern but I'm quite a stickler when it comes to banking and following regulations on financial matters like loans and taxes.

While I am not the first, nor will I be the last, student loan jockey applying for a French study visa, George - the representative at the consulate - had apparently never seen a Notice of Assessment before and rejected it right away. Enter my pleading and begging. George softened and consulted with a Madame, made a phone call, called me over and stated plainly that he would accept the document.

Final thoughts
All in all, making photocopies and organising the documents were annoying but the visa application was not that hard. I was glad that I remembered to keep in mind an observation that has been imparted to me on several occasions: the French are well-known for having a developed bureaucratic system of documents that they take very seriously, and since the Consulate is like a little piece of France in your own backyard, it is no different. The advice that I've been given on how to manoeuvre through this system is: be persistent but extremely polite and you can usually expect favourable outcomes. I came to enjoy the thud of George's stamp - which seemed to have been accompanied by some mysterious echo - as he brought it down on each individual sheet on his desk.