screech339 said:
I agree that the onus is on the applicant to provide proof of it not applying to canadian laws. However the example you gave is not a good example. There is no laws on apostasy in Canada at all thus no comparison to make. You are comparing apples to oranges in comparing laws that exist outside Canada to laws that don't exist in Canada. No apples to apples comparisons.
Criminal DUI in Canada requires a BAC of 0.08 (http://www.madd.ca/madd2/en/impaired_driving/impaired_driving_bac.html). Thus, a conviction with a BAC below that level
is not a crime in Canada - no more than apostasy. It's an apples to apples comparison.
screech339 said:
However there are worldwide laws regarding underage sex and drinking and driving in examples I have provided. This way I can argue about the merit of it. Comparing apples to apples in examples. I would not provide samples of foreign convictions or laws that we don't even have Canadian laws on.
The point is that in order to make a determination, you have to determine what the crime would be under Canadian law. If it's not a criminal offence, then it's not the basis for a determination of criminal inadmissibility.
But let's take your example of underage sex: the age of consent actually varies by location. Some jurisdictions allow differences in age to control as well, while others do not. In at least one case I recall, a 15 year old male was charged with statutory rape of a 16 year old girl - because the law was gender specific. Thus, if someone is convicted of statutory rape it may not be equivalent to the Canadian offence - so no matter that this person has a criminal record, once the CIC officer determines that it wasn't a crime in Canada, it is not pertinent.
I chose apostasy as a clear example (precisely because it is not a crime in Canada), but they are all treated the same for the purposes of immigration law. And all of them would cause a vastly slower processing time - the determination of the criminal equivalent in Canada can be quite challenging (as the person asking about illegal status pointed out - that's a
felony in the US but it isn't a crime in Canada.)