Dear Roumeliotis
Thank you for your email. I have not received a response from the unit responsible for outland spousal app intake. While waiting for that to somehow happen one day, I would like to bring up two concerns whilst, I understand, that your Department may be looking at options to facilitate temporary entry into Canada for spouses/partners with outland PR in process. The two issues include interpretation and respect for the Minister's delivery update by your overseas staff and offices, and the second issue is the continued delay in AOR and inconsistency in processing outland apps, that I haven't seen improvement. Please spare some time to review the below.
The first issue is the interpretation of dual intent by different officers. The chart below shows a remarkable high refusal rate for TRV for this group - at below 50%. Most cases were refused on the basis that the officers did not believe the persons will leave Canada by the end of authorized stay because they are in a marital relationship with Canadians. Despite the program delivery was updated in Oct 2020, looking at the data in 2021, officers continued to have serious bias against this group of applicants. I would blame the Minister's Office for not taking this issue seriously - making the update only as a program delivery update on Dual Intent, and leaving the bias an open option for your officers, as well as a communication issue to make sure staff respect and comply. Let's go back to the very basic logic of humanity: what's wrong when people in love want to spend time and support each other? The Canadian visa system long ago, used to have a special visa category for fiance but that had been scrapped - then in absence of such an option, the system should promote and make family reunification for your own citizens a smooth and easy process, not the other way around. The USA immigration system has a temporary visa stream called K1, which allows foreign nationals to come into the USA and get married with their partner within 3 months of arrival. Fact check: post-covid, USA, Australia and UK were all pretty quick in picking up the processing capacity for immigration and only Canada still struggles with backlog and has a system designed to discriminate spouses/partners of your fellow Canadians/PRs - whether you want to accept or deny this statement, the numbers and facts are there! This is a big national shame. Canadians get freak out when they choose to love and marry someone from outside Canada because they will face a process that is biased, lengthy, unpredictable and inconsistent across similar streams and visa offices. What can you do to address these? We talk about annual target of 500k new PRs every year now, we talk about issuing Work Permits to a various streams of spouses/partners of temporary residents yet Canada continues to make it an endless nightmare for spouses/partners of Canadians even their only wish could be just a visitor visa to be able to spend time in Canada. Please have a proper analysis and communication to your visa offices and stop this practice because not only is it unfair, and logically wrong, it is also inhumane.
The second issue is still the challenges for outland spouses intake. Your Department said in the previous emails that it is taking 10 weeks for this stream to receive AOR. The time of 10 weeks itself I think needs a lot of improvement, let alone inconsistency. We are talking about 10 weeks of the file unopened and just sit there in your portal untouched. TRV applications are auto-screened by the portal, get AOR issuance in a matter of hours. Inland spousal apps get AOR within days. Then why can't the process be improved for outland spousal apps? You link this to the issue of a high TRV rejection rate and you will see why families and Canadians go crazy about your system and why media keeps reporting on what many refer to as systemic discrimination. I personally dont think it has anything to do with discrimination, however, this is happening because it appears nobody at the Ministerial level has cared and understood the problems enough - or even if they did, no concrete and sincere actions were done to fix, leaving Canadians and families continue to suffer hopelessly.
Here, again, is my ask, on behalf of Canadians who are waiting to be united with their spouses/partners/dependent children overseas:
1. Please publicize a visa policy to facilitate TRV entry for outland spouses immediately. Why immediately? Because this has been a controversial issue for years, raised by so many stakeholders and at the IRCC, acknowledged by the Department, thrown in the Minister's mandate letter since December 2021. After over two years of no action, it should be done out of immediate respect for Canadians and affected families. In parallel, communicate and monitor oversea visa offices on rejections. Globe and Mail recently revealed the Department's plan to waive eligibility for half a million visitor visa caseload in an effort to clear TRV backlog - no reasons if you can do such an ambitious plan for regular visitors, many of whom have no connections to Canada, but can't afford the same to family members of Canadian citizens.
2. Please continue to work with the outland spousal intake unit at CPC-Sydney. Sorry to be frank but please don't get offended if not true - your officers, many of whom are new hires with junior professional working experience and I imagine quite a few are working remotely, are not doing a very good job in screening intake for outland spousal apps. The AOR/bio letters for outland must continue to improve significantly to the level that is similar to inland, that is within a week or two of online submission, not 10 weeks plus. The unit is still working on files submitted early November and it has exceeded 10 weeks standard - please speak to the managers of the unit for real reports and not oral statements.
Lastly, I appreciate your well intended communications. The issues I share with you have been real and seriously damage your department's reputation and I hope you continue to work amongst yourselves at the Minister Office to fix them.
Best
BB |
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