Permits for Living in France
We found out that the Canadian government-funded health plan requires that you live in Canada for six months a year in order to provide any coverage. Not wanting to be uninsured we investigated moving to Holland. The government there advised us that as Canadian citizens we could not take up residence unless under some legitimate work arrangement. However, having a UK passport, I was able to register as a Dutch resident through the Aliens Police in the Netherlands. Barbara was then allowed to register as the spouse of a registered resident.
Holland controls immigration and residency quite well. In order to own a car with Dutch registration you need a Dutch driver's license. In order to have a Dutch driver's license you need a registration card. The registration card brings with it the need to have an address in Holland, which must be registered with the city hall in the town in which you live, and it must be for a residential location not a wharf site. With registration you can get a phone line, health insurance, an email connection, and you may pay tax. None of these can be done without registration, though you can have phone service by using a mobile phone with a Dutch pay-as-you-go card.
If you live in the UK this is all much easier as you can reasonably commute during the building stage and drive your own car. The authorities will get on your case for the foreign license plates after a few months so it is not without some risk. If you live in the USA, it is likely that you will have private health insurance that will cover you anywhere so this does not provide the same concern as does the Canadian government program.
When we finished the boat we moved down to France, still maintaining our Dutch address as do all of the Dutch bargers here in the port. A short time ago, after a 5 week wait, we received our Titre de Sejour or permit to live in France for longer than three months. We are not yet sure of all of the uses that this card has, but it is technically a requirement. We can get an international driving permit as long as we have a valid Canadian license, and this is good for the first year of residence. The Titre de Sejour has allowed us to purchase a car, insure it, and purchase French medical coverage. We applied for the Titre de Sejour based on being Canadian ex-pats with an EU passport, and had to provide the following documentation:
- Two passport type photographs,
- Photocopies of a visible means of support, such as a pension or bank statement,
- Photocopy of the passport page with the photgraph and information
- A copy of our marriage certificate
- A copy of our birth certificates
- A copy of the electricity bill, which demonstrates residence and proves our address
The French medical system is ranked as the best in the world, and insurance coverage for about 70% of all costs can be purchased at 8% of your annual income. We have successfully acquired the Assurance Maladie Securite Sociale and the coverage varies for medicine, doctor visits and hospital stays. The coverage is quite generous and between Barb and me we have received a lot more benefit than cost. We recently augmented the national insurance with a mutual insurance plan. Our mutual coverage costs about 65 Euros a month and picks up the percentage not covered by the national plan. In total we are now paying a little over 230 Euros a month. None of the documents had to be notorized. We were advised that we would receive a letter confirming our application and that this would be followed by a one year permit. After a year we would receive a five year permit, I assume if we were still interested. We did get the letter and a very short term permit followed five weeks later. Before I could pick this one up the five year permit had arrived so the process was really very quick and efficient.
One requirement of France is that you hold a Permis "C" Speciaux or Permis Peniche Privees for boats of between 15 and 39 metres. This allows navigation in the interior waterways. The French do not check this document often but it is noted as a requirement by our boat insurance policy and is therefore mandatory from our perspective. It is not allowed as an alternative to the license of the country in which one lives, which has created some difficulty recently. For example a Dutch resident cannot have a PP and cruise in Holland without the Dutch equivalent license. This makes sense as it would mean Holland had deferred its licensing authority to France if they accepted French licenses for Dutch citizens. Technically we should have had the Dutch license because our barge is registered in Holland, but it is only available with a Dutch language exam which we would find a lot tougher than French. Now that we are residents of France we need the PP. Anyway, thanks to the kind tutoring of Tam and Di Murrell I have successfully completed the requirements and now proudly display it for all officialdom.
We did hear indirectly from Roger Van Dyken that American barge owners can apply to the US authorities to have a barge that is registered in another country declared as American owned, which then puts the licence under US requirements. This is certainly something that one should investigate but may lead to some complicated dealings in areas of insurance with contract terms such as "meet the licensing requirements of the country in which the ship is located". This is a topic worth thorough investigation.