Reactivating this post. Same situation on above person. He has been living in the Philippines since end Nov. 2018. He wants to return to Canada as he has only his disability pension to pay for his needs -food, medicine, occasional visits to doctors, MRI - all very expensive. OHIP now I understand takes immediate to reacquire. ODSP can also be reinstated. Can he bring a support person to live with him - a girl friend he hopes to marry in Canada (he’s divorced already while in Canada before.)
It will be challenging to make this happen. Here are the issues you will face:
- Until the girlfriend is either a PR or has a work permit, the best she can do is visit Canada temporarily. She cannot move here or live here and cannot act as a support person for the Canadian (this will be classified as working illegally unless she is a PR or has a valid work permit that allows her to do so).
- To sponsor her for PR, they must either be married or common law. Common law means that they have lived together for a year in Canada continuously and have evidence to prove it. Processing of sponsorship applications is taking well over a year right now (close to two years). The options are to sponsor while the Canadian is outside of Canada and wait the two years for the application to be processed. The Canadian will need to show hard evidence that they plan to relocate to Canada as soon as the PR visa is approved. Given the Canadian's profile, it may be quite difficult to prove this. The other option is to sponsor inland however this requires both the Canadian as well as the girlfriend to be physically in Canada. So in that case the first step would be for the girlfriend to apply for a TRV and hope it's approved (there is a high chance it will be refused). If approved, this will allow her to enter Canada but it won't allow her to be a support person.
- When the Canadian sponsors the girlfriend, one of the assessments IRCC will conduct is a financial one to determine if the sponsor has sufficient income to ensure the person they are sponsoring won't end up on social assistance. Technically it is possible to sponsor someone while on ODSP however this does cause IRCC to review the application more closely and generally you would want the person being sponsored (in this case, the GF) to be independently employed and have sufficient career prospects in Canada to give IRCC the comfort that she won't be relying on social assistance. If the GF is the Canadian's care-giver, then this gives the strong impression they will both rely on social assistance since the Canadian isn't going to be getting enough money to pay her a salary. This is problematic for the sponsorship application and means that the application could be refused for financial reasons.
- Having the girlfriend apply for a work permit now to be a support person isn't in any way doable. For this to be doable, the Canadian would need to be in Canada and employed and making enough income to cover the costs of a support person's salary. Someone who is on a pension + ODSP won't have anywhere near enough income to qualify. This is a complete no go.
Overall, the Canadian can certainly return to Canada to live here. The rest, including bringing the GF here, is far far less certain and may be difficult to achieve.
