ARCHIVED – Speaking notes for The Honourable Jason Kenney, P.C., M.P. Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism

At an event to announce changes to spousal sponsorship

Mississauga, Ontario
October 26, 2012

As delivered

Good morning, everyone.

I’m Jason Kenney, Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism.

It’s a real pleasure to be here this morning for an important announcement – the culmination of a great deal of work that has been done by a number of Canadians in cooperation with myself and Citizenship and Immigration Canada.

You all know that many Canadians have been the victims of immigration marriage fraud, people whose hearts have been broken by people from overseas who used them to come to Canada as a permanent resident.

Only to be quickly betrayed and left to pick up the pieces of their lives after the foreigners who they sponsored as spouses into Canada left them —often with big bills to pay for their welfare and, of course, with great emotional damage in their lives.

This issue came to my attention shortly after becoming Minister. In fact, I believe it was in the summer of 2009 that I first met with Canadians Against Immigration Fraud who brought to my attention the large number of Canadians who had been victimized by fake immigration marriages.

As I began to look more closely at the issue, I realized that this was a serious problem.
In fact at, the initial meeting that I had with Mr. Sam Benet and other representatives of Canadians Against Immigration Fraud, I committed on the spot back then in our meeting a little over three years ago to take action on this.

They had made a number of proposals, one of which was to bring in a period of conditional residency for foreign sponsored spouses to obtain permanent residency. 

Government doesn’t move quickly. It certainly doesn’t move as quickly as I would like or I know that you would like, Sam, but we wanted to make sure that the changes that we made to this delicate and important area of immigration spousal sponsorship would be very deliberate, and considered following widespread public consultation.

That is why we launched in the fall of 2009 and the winter of 2010, widespread public consultations across Canada on how to better regulate immigration marriages to better combat fraudulent ones.

We had huge town hall meetings here in the GTA and Vancouver and Montreal – across the country. We had roundtable meetings with victims and with experts in immigration policy and members of the general public. We did public opinion polling. We had online consultations that received thousands of responses. I know many members of parliament also engaged in their own consultations. The House of Commons Immigration Committee studied the issue.

Coming from all of these consultations, a very clear consensus emerged which was that we did not have adequate legal tools to combat clearly fraudulent immigration marriages. And that we should bring in a period of conditional residency for foreign sponsored spouses, so that they would not immediately obtain that residency upon arriving in Canada.

Because the problem is that, when a foreign sponsored spouse arrives at the airport from abroad, they are stamped in as a permanent resident here at Pearson Airport. There’s very little that can then be done to address their fraud, if they don’t even go and live with the spouse at all. 

And, of course, many people in the South Asian community will know the case of Ashpreet Badwal. This is exactly what happened to her. After an appeal, her husband won the right to come to Canada. He arrived at the airport and never even went to greet his wife.

In many cases, the spouses who sponsored people here in Canada don’t even know what happened. They know that the person was approved, but they don’t know if they came into Canada. They’re not even informed if they’re here. And then, one day, they suddenly get a bill from social services to pay for the welfare that’s being used by the fraudulent spouse who came into Canada.

We just had a case like this covered by the CBC in Vancouver where an 82-year-old Canadian man sponsored a Russian lady in her 70s who was here on a visitor’s visa. The day after she got her permanent residency papers, she left his house and he never saw anything more from her until he got a $26,000 bill from B.C. Social Services to pay for her welfare. This is something that he had undertaken as part of the sponsorship agreement.

So these things happen far, far too often. Not only are there innocent victims like that. In too many cases, there are two guilty parties in immigration marriage fraud when Canadians knowingly sponsor a foreign spouse into Canada in exchange for money. They then quickly divorce that person, who will then often then go on to sponsor someone else in, sometimes for money. And there is an entire industry that has facilitated this form of commercial marriages.

For example, our visa officers in Hong Kong caught on to a wave of fake commercial immigration marriages being organized by triads out of the Guangzhou region of Southern China. In 2009 and 2010, they ended up rejecting 50 percent of the marriage spousal applications coming out of the Cantonese regions of China. That’s because these were highly organized and very clear cases of commercial immigration fraud.

And so, friends, that’s the nature of the problem. It’s a reflection, quite frankly, of the generosity of Canada. We are the most generous country in the world with respect to immigration. We are admitting the highest sustained levels of immigration in Canadian history, the highest per capital levels of immigration in the developed world and we are an open and welcoming country. With that openness, sometimes, people seek to exploit it. And that’s what’s happened too often with respect to immigration marriage fraud.

Let me be clear. We want to welcome bona fide, legitimate sponsored spouses of Canadians to join us in building their lives together in Canada, in starting their families and raising their children. But we will not tolerate people who see to abuse Canadians who have sponsored them. Or who violate Canada’s laws and treat marriage like some cynical commercial transaction, just to bring people into Canada in what constitutes a form of human smuggling.

That is why we have, following our widespread public consultations, committed in the last election to act in this area. We pre- published regulations that had to go through another period of public commentary and then, on March 2, 2012, we brought in the first important measure which was implemented: the five-year bar on subsequent sponsorships for people who entered Canada as through immigration marriages.

That is to say, if you came into Canada as a sponsored spouse and got divorced, in the past you could then immediately re-sponsor and then divorce again and re-sponsor.  We’ve stopped that revolving door with the new five-year bar, which is standard amongst other democratic countries. And so you will no longer be able to run the revolving door, using your privilege of marital sponsorship as a money maker for yourself. That door closed on March 2, 2012.

After this, we then pre-published the regulation for a conditional period for two years for permanent residency for foreign sponsored spouses.

Today, I am pleased to announce that, after over three years of working with victims of immigration marriage fraud, after three years of hard consultation and policy work that, effective immediately, foreign sponsored spouses who enter Canada, will have a two-year condition on their permanent residency that will not be lifted until after two years have elapsed. 

This will allow us, finally, to take meaningful enforcement action against the fraudulent spouses who enter Canada. Because we may be able to revoke their residency if it’s clear in cases, like Ashpreet’s husband, that they did not enter Canada in good faith, that they were merely coming here to exploit Canadians and break our laws.

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