tuyen said:
... you deserve to be kicked out - even if it's 9 or 10 years after you arrived.
Remember, that when you build up these rules you need to either leave enough "slack" in the system to give someone the ability to make judgment calls, or you need to accommodate every possible outcome.
So, let's take a hypothetical case here: a US/Canadian same-sex couple who had lived together in Texas for 10 years. The US citizen finds a great job in Toronto that qualifies under NAFTA. They decide to move. After a year or two in Ontario, they decide to get married. They then start the PR process. For whatever reason, it takes 2-3 years - perhaps the visa office is closed just as their application gets to the front of the queue so it ends up stuck to the bottom of the U-Haul that moves all the files to the new VO... It's approved. Because they weren't married 2 years at the time the application was filed, a provisional PR is granted. Seven years into this period the Canadian sponsor is diagnosed with terminal cancer and is ultimately moved to hospice.
So, the American half of this couple loses citizenship when his/her partner dies: move to hospice constitutes a termination of the cohabitation required by the spousal sponsorship. But he/she hasn't lived in the US in 10+ years, his/her work and home is in Toronto.
Contrived? Well, I know a couple that would pretty much fit everything except the terminal cancer step.
Personally, I fully plan on spending the rest of my life with my spouse. I'm the older of us, so I suspect I'm lucky in that regard, as I'll be the first to go, so the
ad hominem attack on me is pointless in this case. Further, I'm not subject to the conditional spousal PR. So I have no dog in this fight - but I don't like seeing broad generalizations either because in my experience life is not so black and white - that's why I favour systems that provide lattitude to a decision maker to do "what is right" in a given situation. It's just too hard to "get it right" up front. Life just isn't that simple.