I preface this with the following statement:
I am a Canadian Citizen, and also an American Citizen. My experience is specific to the ‘joys’ of Dual Citizenship.
Now that that’s out of the way, I recently moved to Canada! Like a month ago recently. After living in the US all my life (and 80% of that in California) we decided to move to up. My wife applied for her Permanent Residency (outland spousal sponsorship) and we trucked ourselves up to British Columbia (outside of Vancouver).
Moving House
You should know it’s expensive to move anywhere, but the border makes it worse. We did find a great company, and the price was high but actually around as much as it cost my Mother In Law to move from Mississippi to Oregon in the 1980s! So either she got robbed or I got a deal. Hard to say. Anyway, we boxed up the house ourselves, the movers wrapped up the TV and other large items, and all told it took them less time to get here than it did for us to get to our new house!
Renting a new house was interesting, since we did it remotely. I’ve done that before (when I moved to California oddly enough) and the house is nice. The movers teased us a lot (saying I had/didn’t have a lot of stuff) but I was so happy to have them to the hauling for me! They showed up on Tuesday and we booked it to a hotel for the next couple days.
Moving the car was a whole different story. It cost about 1/3rd of the price of moving, and was a shitshow because the company was not very responsive. Or rather, the person we were trying to contact wasn’t responsive. Once I got to her coworker, it went way better. We were originally planning to drive, but when we factored in the cost of the drive (hotels and gas) it worked out to be about the same, so we flew up.
There’s a side story with a shitty rental that was supposed to be a short-term (2 week) rental and turned out to be a hell hole and I’m waiting on a refund. It doesn’t matter for this story.
Border Drama
We got up to Canada on a Thursday. The border guard who checked us in had some odd questions. Like why did I have my Family Silver in my suitcase (… moving) and why was my wife here with Dual Intent (… moving) and why did I have an itemized and cost breakdown for the truck (… MOVING). The guard also put in my info wrong, which we’ll get to in a minute.
The moving truck showed up on Monday, six days from leaving our old place! Since we didn’t get the keys to our house until the first of the month, they let us put our stuff in storage for up to a month (charge included). So that was okay. But on Monday we went to the border office… in Downtown Vancouver … to sign for our truck. That’s where I learned the info was wrong.
See the airport agent put in that I was a returning citizen. Technically I am not as I never had residence in Canada. I am a Settler, or a Canadian moving to Canada for the first time. Being a Settler meant I did not have to pay all the import fees and it streamlined the process a lot. Thankfully the agents at the office were understanding, fixed my paperwork, and sent me happily back to the hotel.
Three days later, the car arrived. We went to pick up the papers, then back to downtown, then back to the car depot, and finally we had a car! However this was not without a hassle, as the paperwork being messy meant I had to go back and forth with RIV (Registration of Imported Vehicles) and finally called them to explain they had not emailed me the form, and it wouldn’t download because I hadn’t filed it… which I couldn’t do without the form. They emailed it to me and all was well.
For now…
Banking
Next up, I opened a Canadian bank account. I got one that also had a US bank account, so my company can pay me directly and I can transfer that to my Canadian account for paying bills.
Most of my credit cards were fine with me changing my address, though I did have to call three of them to get it done because you can’t do it online if it’s outside the US. One changed it and then informed me that they would have to cancel my card. Oh well.
If you are moving, I strongly recommend getting an American Express. You can transfer it to Canada once you’re here. That said, remember you may not have any Canadian Credit (I didn’t) so you should wait until you have some. I have a Canadian Credit Card, but my credit rating is ‘mid’ until I use it and pay things off. Not having credit led to a lot of hilarity. I have a student phone plan because they couldn’t figure out any other way to do it.
By the way, there’s also a huge issue with a lot of credit card companies not accepting addresses that have letters and numbers in the zip code. Canada is ANANAN (letter, number, letter, number, letter number) to the USA’s NNNNN. One extra character and letters broke so many webforms! If you’re a web developer, consider that it’s perfectly legal to have a US credit card and an non-US address.
Shopping and Recycling
We eventually got to the house and went to get the staples (flour, rice, cleaning supplies, spices…) because we couldn’t bring any of our open food to Canada. Shopping here is subtly different than the US. It’s not totally weird, but it’s just off from familiar that I kept getting confused.
I made a concerted effort to buy and shop local to Canada for a couple reasons, but the biggest is carbon footprint.
Speaking of that, recycling is weird/cool. Where I live, Wednesday is ‘garbage’ day. I use it in quotes, because every other Wednesday is garbage, and the other is recycling! I had a metric load of boxes, so we went down to a RecycleIt and dropped those off. That’s where I learned you can’t recycle glass via the pickups because it could break. I now have an app that lets me look up what I can and cannot recycle and where. I ended up paying a small fee to have someone pick up a truck load of the broken down boxes, all the packing paper, and other miscellaneous recycling stuff from setting up home.
Also, every week we have an organics pickup which includes greens (veggies) but also meat! Meaning you can just dump it all in there. It’s weird, right? I picked up some paper bags to use for that, and we just fill one up for the week and drop it in.
License and Insurance
Moving from California made my license relatively easy. I set an appointment, went in, had my eyes checked, handed them a copy of my driving record, and I was out in 15 minutes with a paper saying I had a license coming. However there were two oddities. First, they had trouble figuring out when my license was issued (California puts it in tiny print on the bottom!) and second, they had trouble comprehending I was a nearly 50 year old woman with no Canadian driving history.
That said, I had to mail (physically mail) to the California DMV because their online form was broken and wouldn’t work if you had an out of state address. The paper form … didn’t have space for another country (and couldn’t fit my zip code). I had to call. The lady at the DMV was flummoxed, got her manager who was also confused, got her supervisor who finally called Sacramento and was told to add the extra letter outside the box (…) and for county put Canada.
Of course I also had to buy special stamps to mail to the US but that’s another story.
Next up, we got the car checked. We took the RIV paperwork to Canada Tire and got both the RIV and the provincial (state) check done. We had a minor issue with the DRL (Daytime Running Lights). No one in California knew how to set it so they were always on and it took a couple calls to a Ford dealer in the area to find one who could do it. It was a 30 minute job.
We took the finished paperwork to Autoplan. There is only one insurer for cars in British Columbia! And apparently we were this location’s first US to Canada people, as it took over an hour to explain the following:
- I’m a dual citizen, the other owner of the car is not
- I have a BC driver’s license, the other owner does not
- The car is a hybrid, not electric only
- We are two women, married, of course we have the same address
Also do you remember the airport agent who put in that I was a returning citizen and not a settler? Yeah, so she filled it in to say I didn’t have to pay import taxes for 2026, but no mention of the future. ICBC (Insurance Corp. of British Columbia — aka the DMV) had to fix that for us, which they did in a 5 minute phone call.
Then there was another import oddity. See, the car title (in California) is in both our names. But the shipping to Canada was only in my name so we could avoid fees (this is legal!). That meant the RIV form says only I imported the car. We wanted the title in our names and this confused the poor young lady filing our paperwork. Her boss stepped in and said it was fine, and also legal to have a US citizen on the title of a Canadian car, as long as I was primary.
While they were checking that, my wife joked she’d sell me her half of the car for sushi dinner. I asked if she wanted a new toaster, which she accepted. The boss and the other coworkers started laughing at us.
Eventually we got the price (2/3rds of the cost in California!) and paid it off for the year. We picked out our new plates and off we went.
What’s the weirdest part?
Honestly it’s … nice here. Like people are nice. The moment they figure out I’m new (the California plates were a giveaway) they asked if I was visiting, and I would say ‘re-patriating’ and get a ‘welcome home’ response. Also so many people are just openly, casually, queer here. Not that there’s not racism or queerphobes out here, but people are more inclined to live and let live.
100% of the American companies I’ve talked to have asked me if it’s cold here. 80% of them have been openly jealous of the move.
99% of the Canadian companies have been polite, kind, and helpful. Also they’re nearly all delighted when they find out I’m a citizen coming home. The one dude who was a jerk had his boss step in to take over and apologize. I said it was okay to have a bad day.
50% of the Canadians in stores (checkout people etc) asked why I would move from California, but that’s stopped after Alex Pretti was murdered by ICE. (Note: The only reason they knew I was new is that I was having trouble remembering my phone number and that led to ‘why the new phone’? and me explaining I’d moved, which naturally leads to ‘from where?’)
But hands down having a King on my money is weirdest.