Filing your E-2 visa at the U.S. Consulate Calgary

The exemption on tabs and dividers deserves attention. At a post like Lisbon, where nothing is exempt, every divider sheet costs a page of evidence. Here the structure is free, so a well-organised package costs nothing that a badly organised one saves.

Where 50 pages is genuinely tight, the mission suggests using the short business plan option to reduce the count. That is a published recommendation rather than a workaround, and it is the intended lever.

It is also the right lever, because the business plan is the one document in the package whose length is a drafting choice rather than a fact. Tax returns and bank statements are as long as they are.

The package is emailed to EVisaCanada@state.gov as a single PDF in a single attachment, capped at 20 MB. ZIP archives and shared folders are rejected.

Note that the 50 pages and the 20 MB are separate constraints. A short package of high-resolution scans can breach the size cap while sitting well inside the page limit, and the fix for that is scan quality rather than deletion.

A printed copy of the entire package comes to the interview for the officer to review. Organise it into tabbed sections with dividers, and subdivide any numbered section holding more than two documents into lettered subsections.

The paper copy is not a formality. It is what the officer works from in the room, and its organisation is the difference between an officer finding your ownership evidence and asking you where it is.

We score Calgary a 1 for third-country nationals — the same as Ottawa, below Toronto’s 3 and Vancouver’s 2. The score describes willingness to schedule an appointment, not eligibility for approval.

Because all seven Canadian posts share one E-visa unit, an applicant without a Canadian tie loses nothing substantive by applying at a more open post instead.

There is no single total. The MRV fee is fixed, published and tied to your DS-160. Preparation costs vary with the case, and the required paper copy adds a printing expense that email-only posts do not impose.

Check the current published MRV fee before you pay.

The Department of State publishes current appointment wait times by post. The seven Canadian posts are listed separately, and since one unit reads every Canadian case, comparing those waits is a real option rather than a false economy.

Any post-interview administrative processing sits on top and is not uniform across applicants.

The E-2 is a nonimmigrant treaty investor visa open to nationals of countries holding a qualifying treaty of commerce with the United States, and Canada is one of those treaty countries. You must have invested, or be actively investing, a substantial amount of your own at-risk capital in a real and operating U.S. business that you will direct and develop, and the commitment must be irrevocable.

The enterprise must be at least 50 percent owned by persons holding the treaty nationality, or controlled by a qualifying national — a test that turns on the ownership table rather than on the applicant.