I know this is a long shot, but maybe someone out there can help me.\u00a0 My problem is this:\u00a0 everyone I can reach at Revenue Canada tells me that I can only get my Residency Certificate through a specific office in London, Ontario.\u00a0 And every last one of them refuses to give me the contact information for that office.<\/p>\n
Yes, really.<\/p>\n
The facts are these.\u00a0 Every year, various foreign governments preemptively tax all moneys generated within their jurisdictions.\u00a0 This includes moneys made by me, via translation deals and overseas editions;\u00a0 bureacrats the world over intercept any advances or royalties headed my way, and flense thirty percent off the top before I even see it \u2014 unless<\/em> I present them with a letter from my own government attesting to the fact that I am a Canadian citizen who will be paying the requisite taxes at home.\u00a0 There are treaties in place to make sure this goes smoothly, and last year, it did.<\/p>\n Unfortunately there are also civil servants and hive-dwelling drones to make sure it doesn’t.<\/p>\n I called the same general-info line I called last year, the line which (last year) got me everything I needed with two forwards. Twice, this time, the person I spoke with told me she didn’t know the answer to my question, and put me on hold while she found “an agent who can help you”.\u00a0 After the usual Muzakal interlude, I got a cheery “I’m connecting you now!”\u2014 only to be booted back to the same general-enquiry line, with a different oblivious drone who in turn, had to go in search of this mythical “agent who can answer your question”.<\/p>\n The third time I was told that all these sorts of requests were handled by the London Office, and was even given a new and different phone number.\u00a0 Unfortunately it was the number for the “Revenue Canada TeleRefund Service”, an entirely automated line devoted to taking people’s SINs and calculating their tax refunds, without even the token option of speaking to a Human being.\u00a0 Back to the general enquiry line, where a new, sterner, and increasingly cuntly voice kept interrupting my attempts at defining the problem to insist that I had to contact the individual embassies<\/em> of the various countries involved for my certificates, even though the certification itself came from Canada.\u00a0 Somewhere in there, though, the London, Ontario office got mentioned again, so I decided to run with it: all last year’s certificates came from the London Office according to their mastheads (all signed by one “A. Stallaert” of “Taxpayer Services”)\u2014 but the masthead itself gave no telephone or e-mail address, only a URL for the Revenue Canada website and a fax number.<\/p>\n I had already spent some time on the Revenue Canada website, using its “Search” function to look for occurrences of “certificate of residency” (no hits), “residency certificate” (no hits), “Residence certification”, “Certification of residence”, “certification of residency” (no hits no hits no hits) and “residency” anywhere on the same page as\u00a0 “certificate” (ten thousand hits).\u00a0 I haven’t sent or received a fax (or even seen a fax machine, for that matter) since before the turn of the century.\u00a0 I asked the woman on the other end of the line if the London Office accepted faxes sent via e-mails.\u00a0 “There is no email”, she snapped.\u00a0 How about a phone number for the London Office?\u00a0 “You can call 1-800-959-8281.”<\/p>\n “But that’s the general enquiry line.\u00a0 That’s this <\/em>li\u2014“<\/em><\/p>\n At which point it occured to me that I might not actually be talking any more to someone at the general enquiry line.\u00a0 I’d been forwarded and transfered so many times that I might be talking to a different number entirely.\u00a0 I asked if she was speaking to me from the General Enquiry Line.<\/p>\n She wouldn’t even tell me that<\/em>.\u00a0 In fact, she seemed so put out by the fact that I’d even asked that she told me she was going to end the call, and hung up on me.<\/p>\n So this is where things stand.\u00a0 I am about to lose 30% of my overseas income for want of a half-dozen form letters.\u00a0 I can only get these letters via London, and apparently only through fax (which I don’t have) or possibly smoke signals.\u00a0 I could always trudge a half-mile to the nearest Kinko’s and drop four bits on their self-serve fax machine, but of course I then have no way of knowing if the message has gone through, if it has been read, if anyone is on the case.\u00a0 Given my experiences of Friday, I think I can be forgiven a certain reluctance to trust that anyone is likely to get back to me unless I am in actual real-time contact.\u00a0 Which is probably exactly why they won’t reveal their phone number in the first place.<\/p>\n I used Google Maps on 451 Talbot, and dredged up an “unverified phone number” for someone who at least works in the building, but for all I know it’s the janitor.\u00a0 If all else fails I can always just show up there in person when I drive down to give my reading at Fanshawe, but at this rate they probably keep their doors bolted during business hours and call the police if anyone\u00a0 presses their nose against the glass. Besides, the clock is ticking: Blindsight<\/em> comes out in France next month, and I may not have the luxury of another four days.<\/p>\n I’ll be contacting my Federal MP to see if he can bring me any joy.\u00a0 But in the meantime, if anyone out there happens to know the phone number for the Revenue Canada Office at 451 Talbot in London, Ontario, would you please share?\u00a0 If anyone knows an A. Stallaert who works there, might they pass on word of my troubles?<\/p>\n And last but not least, in the name of sheer catharsis: if any of you know anyone who works on Revenue Canada’s public interface, would you be good enough to take a ballpeen hammer to their fucking kneecaps?\u00a0 For me?<\/p>\n Pleeeeease?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I know this is a long shot, but maybe someone out there can help me.\u00a0 My problem is this:\u00a0 everyone I can reach at Revenue Canada tells me that I can only get my Residency Certificate through a specific office in London, Ontario.\u00a0 And every last one of them refuses to give me the contact […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=329"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":337,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329\/revisions\/337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}