u/Ich_Bin_Wolfgang

Sorry, I know I'm not supposed to editorialize, but here's some backstory. My maternal grandmother who raised me was born in Ontario and married a German immigrant in her teens and moved to the U.S. with him before Canadians became Canadian Citizens instead of British Subjects in 1947; because of this I'm a Lost Canadian. In December '25 the (ironically) sexist law preventing my citizenship was overturned (thank you Canada - sincerely) and I filed the paperwork for my proof of citizenship. My spouse and I owned a small business in the U.S. Midwest - a LGBTQIA+ / metaphysical / occult bookstore. We were going to sign a lease and move the store to downtown Winnipeg after our store (in the U.S.) started getting threats and I had a gun pulled on me, figuring Winnipeg would be the "path of least resistance" for moving the store as it was closest and cheapest area near us. We were (and still are) waiting in my citizenship paperwork and we wanted to get a gauge of the sentiment in Winnipeg.

Holy sh*t did we get it - I got called every name I got called in high school all over again and a few I had to look up. I took the post down after 100 comments - literally 90% (90 of the 100) said either "don't bring your maga hats and guns to Canada", "you just want to live here to leech off our free healthcare", or "you're not really a Canadian" or some variation of two or more of those; 1) neither my spouse nor I voted for him 2) we want to live to Canada because I had a gun pulled on me 3) yea, we kinda need healthcare which is why we want to move to Canada...so...kinda fair...I guess 4) yeah, I guess that's kinda true that "I'm not really a Canadian" even though I was raised by a Canadian woman and watched MuchMusic instead of MTV - but I get it. I showed the comments in their entirety to the 5 other people I was helping fill out the same paperwork (a college professor, 2 nurses, a software developer, and a school teacher) and ..well, none of us will be moving to Winnipeg. Ever. My spouse and I decided to close our store - we had planned on trying to keep it open in order to transfer a couple of employees who are trans up to Winnipeg...but considering the feedback I got, they are considering other options.

So why am I posting in a Vancouver subreddit? Winnipeg was *not* our first choice - Vancouver was. I lived in Seattle and Portland and would spend many many weekends in Vancouver. I ran a startup in Seattle with a German company and we actually even though about moving the operation to Canada - when I tried to incorporate a business and get a passport that's actually how I found out I didn't (yet) have Canadian citizenship.

I get the whole "elbows up" thing - and I get the animosity towards some of the people from the US. Trust me, those same people treat me the same way and that's why my spouse and I and my adult child want to leave the U.S. I also know Winnipeg is probably not the best gauge of the sentiment of all of Canada. Can I please though, get some honest feedback of what Vancouver is like now for people from the U.S. immigrating into the city? Just please refrain from the name calling and stereotypes I got in the Winnipeg subreddit.

I already have Ubuntu running on a Samsung Galaxy Android phone. Can a version of Zorin be ran instead of Ubuntu? This is probably stupid - but the only reason I'm trying to use Ubuntu is because I can't get Ollama to work with a Web UI - and I don't have autocorrect nor prompt suggestions on my GBoard keyboard - so I'm experimenting. Also - I'm old and Termux is hard to read. It's mostly for learning but wanted to see if anyone had tried with Zorin since Zorin on my laptop just worked.

Do I have any at all? I have an AOR, the UCI and an application number with my application in process (7 months in progress now). Do I have any legal status whatsoever in Canada?

Also - does anyone know the IRCC number that is NOT the 888 number which can't be reached outside of Canada

thx

so, full disclosure, I'm a dual citizen (or will be once my paperwork is processed) of the US and Canada who has lived in the US all my life. I'm in my early 50s, and because of the C3 bill passed in November of last year I'm now retroactively a Canadian citizen...or...will be...I likely was before, too ...it's complicated - but C3 made it certain I am now. I say this because I've been trying to move to Canada since 1978 and I honestly don't want to be "one of those arseholes from south of the border who took our jobs". I want to move my small business - an art/record/book store (and part time AI consulting and software development) to Winnipeg, but want to get a real temperature of how people feel about those of us fleeing...er, I mean expats from the U.S. And I'm not talking about the BBQ flavored Americans with truck balls and automatic weapons - I'm talking about those of us who know how to recycle and know how to spell a "licence" correctly (even though it makes me twitch to spell it that way), and who walked 2 frickin' miles in the damn rain to vote for the black lady even though it was frickin' pointless because of frickin' gerrymandering ...ahem ....sorry... so ..lay it on me. give me your worst

I finally got sick of Windows antimalware defender and other bloatware causing my 5 year old crappy Dell to be unusable so I set aside ean afternoon to just delete everything and put on Zorin. Once I got past the Intel RST issue and all that bootlogger crap, it took about an hour to install and I was basically expecting a couple of hours of Ubantu command line hell....but... everything just worked. Like ....shockingly so. I even typed in Command without thinking at it brought up the terminal. Nice touch. The *ONLY* thing I couldn't get to connect was neither of my 2 Keychron keyboard would connect via Bluetooth. Granted - I normally use a cable with them anyway - but kind of curious as to why his was the only thing that would fail. It would show up on the menu when I did F1-1 but I couldn't get it to pair.