My partner and I have been seeing each other since February 2019. He is an international student and we met here in Canada. I am a graduate student and native-born Canadian citizen. We are in our early/mid 20s. My partner started living with me informally in September of last year, and formally became my long-term guest May of this year. Altogether we have cohabited for more than a year, but on paper we could probably only prove that we have lived together since May. There are a couple of his phone bills and bank statements that have our address on them from before that. We don't take a lot of pictures or post a lot about our relationship on social media, but we do still have some pictures taken over the past year and a half. We have plenty of messages I could screenshot to prove the length and the nature of our relationship.
I won't go into specifics for the sake of anonymity, but he is in a precarious visa situation. It seems like his inland study permit renewal application, which we submitted almost a year ago, is just ... lost. He's on implied status right now. Legally he can't work or study right now. If he had to go back to his home country there's no knowing when he could come back, especially because conflict has recently broken out there. We were planning sponsorship long before the conflict started, but unfortunately the coincidence might increase the level of stigma his country of origin would carry for the people judging our case.
We could try waiting til May 2021 to do a common-law sponsorship application, but I don't want to wait 7 months to start the process when, at any time, he could lose his implied status and need to leave Canada. We are now considering getting married so that we can start an inland application sooner. Edit: Although we will not have a "real" ceremony til after lockdown, my immediate family will attend our City Hall ceremony, so we can prove that we have the support of my family. His family know about our relationship and support it, but since travel in either direction is near-impossible at this time, we will wait til after COVID to have a ceremony they can participate in.
We were already in each other's life plans for a long time before we considered marriage. Whether or not we end up getting married now, we want to get married someday. We would have no problem proving that we had a genuine romantic relationship prior to the marriage, and we would have no problem proving that we intend to live together as a married couple after getting married. What I am worried about is whether my sponsorship application would be rejected because our marriage would be interpreted as having been undertaken primarily for the purpose of him getting PR status. It is true that, if we got married now, it would be for the purpose of staying together ... is that really "bad faith"? We would prefer to handle the application ourselves rather than paying $5000 for a lawyer or consultant, but I feel like so much could go wrong in the way we present our relationship to the government. We live in Toronto so I am worried that our visa office must see bad faith marriage cases all the time and that they will be very skeptical of us.
It's very hard to find information about our specific kind of situation. If anybody has any advice, or relevant experiences they could share, I would be very grateful.
Edit: Another necessary piece of information is that, while on implied status, he did work "under the table" (part-time, not FT) to support himself. I know that we are likely to be asked by the visa office how I, as a student, managed to support him for over a year while he was unable to work. I have been providing support from my savings and from my work earnings, but he wasn't relying solely on my support. Lying is out of the question for me because I know it would have terrible consequences, but I don't know how to tell the truth without jeopardizing our application.
I won't go into specifics for the sake of anonymity, but he is in a precarious visa situation. It seems like his inland study permit renewal application, which we submitted almost a year ago, is just ... lost. He's on implied status right now. Legally he can't work or study right now. If he had to go back to his home country there's no knowing when he could come back, especially because conflict has recently broken out there. We were planning sponsorship long before the conflict started, but unfortunately the coincidence might increase the level of stigma his country of origin would carry for the people judging our case.
We could try waiting til May 2021 to do a common-law sponsorship application, but I don't want to wait 7 months to start the process when, at any time, he could lose his implied status and need to leave Canada. We are now considering getting married so that we can start an inland application sooner. Edit: Although we will not have a "real" ceremony til after lockdown, my immediate family will attend our City Hall ceremony, so we can prove that we have the support of my family. His family know about our relationship and support it, but since travel in either direction is near-impossible at this time, we will wait til after COVID to have a ceremony they can participate in.
We were already in each other's life plans for a long time before we considered marriage. Whether or not we end up getting married now, we want to get married someday. We would have no problem proving that we had a genuine romantic relationship prior to the marriage, and we would have no problem proving that we intend to live together as a married couple after getting married. What I am worried about is whether my sponsorship application would be rejected because our marriage would be interpreted as having been undertaken primarily for the purpose of him getting PR status. It is true that, if we got married now, it would be for the purpose of staying together ... is that really "bad faith"? We would prefer to handle the application ourselves rather than paying $5000 for a lawyer or consultant, but I feel like so much could go wrong in the way we present our relationship to the government. We live in Toronto so I am worried that our visa office must see bad faith marriage cases all the time and that they will be very skeptical of us.
It's very hard to find information about our specific kind of situation. If anybody has any advice, or relevant experiences they could share, I would be very grateful.
Edit: Another necessary piece of information is that, while on implied status, he did work "under the table" (part-time, not FT) to support himself. I know that we are likely to be asked by the visa office how I, as a student, managed to support him for over a year while he was unable to work. I have been providing support from my savings and from my work earnings, but he wasn't relying solely on my support. Lying is out of the question for me because I know it would have terrible consequences, but I don't know how to tell the truth without jeopardizing our application.
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