No, I'm not "confusing 2 issues here." There's only one issue: whether a visitor visa rejection is relevant. Misrepresentation only comes into this in that Section 40 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act mentions "material facts relating to a relevant matter" and the cases that that section concerns happen to be misrepresentation cases (the section implies that "not material" is a defence to a charge of misrepresentation). What we're interested in is what CIC and the courts have had to say about materiality and relevance.
On that point, I note that failure to disclose a temporary resident visa has been held to be "material" by the courts, for example by the federal court in Edmonton, as Justice Strickland ruled in September 2013:
"The Respondent [CIC] submits that [Lochandath Goburdhun]'s failure to disclose the previous temporary resident visa application constituted a material misrepresentation. ...
In my view, the misrepresentation in this case was material."
Justice Strickland calls attention to CIC's policy document entitled ENF 2/OP 18 Evaluating Inadmissibility. In it we read,
"10.4. Materiality
...
(1) information requested from applicants will be considered relevant, otherwise this information would not be requested; ..."
I think rcohen's "absolutely no impact" statement is too, well, absolute. Even if one could be "absolutely" certain about that, it might matter for someone else. It's not just me asking why visitor visa refusals are asked about in the PR application, it says right there in CIC's manual that they wouldn't be asking for this if they didn't think it relevant to the PR application.
Having said all that, I note that I agree that it's reasonable to believe that the "impact" on whether one will eventually get PR is likely to be negligible. And, indeed, that's why I pointed to another case where, according to Bellissmo Law Group, a judge ruled that for a PR applicant (Goburdhun was applying for another temporary resident visa), it wasn't material. Indeed, the CIC policy document continues from what I quoted above to say "relevant" is not equivalent to the "material" used in section 40:
"(2) this relevant information will not always affect the process undertaken by an officer or the final decision. Only when it affects the process undertaken, or the final decision, does it become material. At this point, misrepresentation of the information means section A40 would apply, regardless of the decision outcome."
Would a TRV refusal make or break a PR application? No, not least because of the precedent that Bellissmo says they won, but that doesn't mean that that's our standard here. The question is whether it could potentially delay things. We know that it's "relevant" in CIC's view and it can furthermore be "material" in the view of the courts depending on the applicant's circumstances such as what the applicant is applying for.
The bottom line is that just because it's typically true that a family class PR applicant applying for a TRV does so in order "to be in canada with their spouse", that doesn't mean it's always true in the eyes of CIC to the extent that CIC will invariably just wave it by without spending time scrutinizing the TRV rejection. It could be that the family class PR applicant applying for a TRV is doing so because they want to enter the country for some other purpose and have decided to try every route that could get them in the door.
I nonetheless stand by what I said earlier, "I substantially agree that it doesn't hurt to try [to get a visit visa]" since "substantially" doesn't mean "absolutely".
