I'll answer the second question first.
I don't know whether there are visa posts that are doing it differently. We work largely with clients whose families are in India and Nepal, so we're dealing with the Canadian high commission in New Delhi. Their practice, as I said, is to send out these form letters.
That being said, I recently—in fact, just earlier this week—received notification that one of our files had been moved from India to Hong Kong. I think it was about processing more quickly, moving things around. The problem is that the Hong Kong office sent out their generic letter, including the request for the household registration document, the hukou.
It's a Chinese document. Our client is in India. Obviously I know that, and I can tell our client, you don't need to get that. But there has to be some common sense used when moving files around. You can't just be sending out generic letters asking for a whole bunch of documents that don't apply to the particular clients. While I appreciate that this is an effort to speed up processing, there are some complications there.
I don't know whether there are visa posts that do it the way I've suggested, but I can't see why it wouldn't make sense and why it isn't possible. There's no reason to see a medical result or even a police clearance before determining whether this person is a member of the family class.