Working out side Canada

Are you sure that there are no timelimits in this case? I mean, if, for any reasons, your husband/wife has to extend his/ her stay abroad...

There is no way to maintain PR status by living OUTSIDE Canada.

I doubt any of us here is qualified to give that level of advice.

I do not answer your question in what follows, but I do make some observations:

Importantly, this is the sort of question which involves much more than immigration. There are tax laws which will have a very substantial impact on how this should be done, perhaps even which will dictate (depending on the nature of the employee relationship) how it is to be done. Moreover, there is the impact of the foreign country's laws, including tax laws, including laws governing foreign businesses operating in the country, among others. All these probably have some impact on how this should be done.

Such laws should be complied with and I suspect that will not really leave much room for immigration considerations.

And of course there is what makes business sense for the company.

Many companies will work with an employee relative to immigration matters, but a company which will go so far as to tailor its employer-employee relationship to a degree that will directly facilitate a PR qualifying as in-residence while living and working abroad raises a red flag in my view.

I should not purport to be giving tax advice, but I do not believe Canada Revenue allows waiting until the end of the year to pay taxes on Canadian income -- they require quarterly installment payments to the extent that taxes are not withheld by an employer. Moreover, I do not believe they allow employers to make an election between withholding taxes or allowing the employee to pay the taxes directly. I think withholding is mandatory. Of course there are probably ways of setting up the employer-employee relationship, relative to employment located outside Canada, that the withhold requirement may be avoided . . . but I suspect (one really should be talking to a qualified lawyer about these things) that leads back to the what the employer-employee relationship really is and who it is between.

(For example, I worked for a large company owned by a Canadian for many years, but I was an employee of that company's foreign based subsidiary -- so I was not an employee of a Canadian company really, even though the ultimate boss was a Canadian living and working in Toronto.)

This involves a level of detail that is ordinarily beyond the scope of general principles and observations most of us can offer much about.

It sounds like the pay is good enough to warrant spending three hundred dollars or so for a consultation with a lawyer (making sure it is a lawyer totally independent of this company); be sure to take all the relevant information, backed up by copies of actual paperwork, to the lawyer.

As a general observation, I would note that the larger, more well established the company is in Canada, and in particular, the more employees it has actually working in Canada (and in particular in proportion to the number of employees working abroad), the less risk of a problem you will have so long as you are indeed an employee, not a contractor. That does not mean smaller companies can not qualify. But CIC can, and apparently in some cases will, look behind the outward manifestations of a "company" to determine the nature of the company and its relationship to its foreign based employees . . . obviously, CIC and CBSA deal with a range of circumstances in which some "companies" are merely fronts providing means pursuant to which PRs living and working overseas appear to be working for a Canadian company but . . . well, I am sure there are all sorts of variations of this. If the company is legitimate, a regular Canadian company, and you are an "employee," you probably have little to worry about; if it is a company trying to look legitimate but is more or less a shell or front, you might want to rethink things.

What qualifies "technically" is not always a guarantee, particularly, of course, if (as I say) some sort of front or shell game is at play.