Lululemon21 said:
Hi, I need advice again.. Me and my common-law husband who is PR has been living together for more than 2 years now. He just landed last December 2015 and, honest mistake, he did not inform Cic that he has a common-law wife. We went to a lawyer because we are planning to submit spousal sponsorship. I read from this forum about paragraph 117 and discussed it with the lawyer. What he said confused me, he said its ok to declare in the application that we haved lived together since 2013 because we did not declare it yet in any government form.
He said that in the form Statutory Declaration as common-law which is included in the application, we will just state the date that we have been cohabiting since jan. 2015 only, so by the time he landed, we were still not common-law. I told him but we are already living together since 2013. He said it doesnt matter because unless you declare your common-law relationship, you are still not considered common-law. He said that we can just say that we are living together but not common-law because we are still not sure about the relationship.
Is this true? This is really confusing. I don't know if this is true or not coz i have been reading in this forum and that's not what i understand. Please correct me if im wrong.
If you are living with someone you are dating, then you are certainly "sure about the relationship". If you weren't sure, you wouldn't be living together. This is how CIC will view it.
As others mentioned, your lawyer is telling you to commit misrepresentation and lie on your app, or he is just a very bad lawyer and really clueless about how common-law status actually works. I would not engage any further with him either way.
The only way CIC would even possibly consider the time spent living together as not qualifying for common-law, is if you were only roommates and not dating at all. Of course this is not true though.
Ponga said:
I say `probably', because some people think that if he renounces his own PR and starts over, he can, but...that's yet to be proven.
What's there to prove? It's perfectly fine to do as per every single rule from CIC. The ban on a non-declared spouse only apples to family class apps, not to worker, economic, etc apps. With a brand new PR app under another stream, the entire reason for the ban in the first place is completely irrelevant as everyone would need to pass medicals again. The hard part is the sponsor needs to abandon their PR status and life in Canada for a while, and actually re-qualify again for PR.
Only potential risk of this other than not qualifying for PR again, is if CIC decides to view the original leaving of spouse off app as misrepresentation and complicates it to get PR again in the future. Though in most economic stream apps, the spouses are usually added with much less burden of proof and scrutiny vs a family class app.