Stewart Sharma Harsanyi Immigration Law Firm Blog

The Residency Obligation

Every permanent resident of Canada needs to comply with the residency obligation; that is to be physically present in Canada for 730 days out of a 5 year period. For a myriad of reasons, many permanent residents are unable to comply with the requirement that they be in Canada for 2 years out of 5. In the situation that I will be discussing today, the client was a citizen of India and originally came to Canada under the Federal Skilled Immigrant Class in 2005 along with his wife and four children. Both his wife and one of his children suffer from a disability in the form of blindness. Prior to coming to Canada, the client resigned from his employment in the Middle East and attempted to obtain employment in Canada. However, he was unable to do so. After arriving in Canada, the applicant stayed in Canada for a short period of time and then, having to support his family, left Canada to continue working abroad. He left his family here (a common fact scenario in these matters). He returned and again attempted to find Canadian employment, but this was in the midst of an economic recession and was again unsuccessful.... Read more →

Obtaining a Stay of a Deportation Order

Three years ago I represented an individual from the Punjabi community. A permanent resident, he was married and had young children in this city. He faced a removal order as a result of a conviction for breaking and entering (his own residence, one that he was barred from entering as a result of domestic strife). Like an onion however, the conviction was only one layer of his narrative. The client was an addict of opiods, and while he maintained a veneer of a normal life, his life was to spiral out of control shortly after his arrival in this country. The client's substance abuse began prior to his arrival in this country. It escalated to heavy alcohol consumption as well as abuse of prescription pain medication after he was sponsored here by his wife. Eventually he was laid off from employment and his interaction with Canada's legal system began, first with a conviction for impaired driving, then a quotidian conviction for causing a disturbance. The convictions escalated with multiple domestic related offences against his long suffering wife. He demanded that his wife provide him money to feed his habit; she resisted and was assaulted. The charge and conviction emanating from... Read more →

Misrepresentation - the Curse and Mark of Cain in Immigration?

Misrepresentation is defined broadly in the Canadian immigration context. I have seen clients sow the wind with lies and omissions, only to reap the whirlwind. In one case that I will be handling in December, the client had previously entered Canada and made a refuge claim. The client's refugee claim was rejected; deported the client returned within months using a different name and passport. Now sponsored by a Canadian, the past has come back to haunt the client. Canada takes and compares fingerprints from all refugee and applicants for permanent residence. The re-entry on a different name and passport was all too easy to discover. The sponsorship was rejected and the client and her spouse have waited many months to put their matter before the Immigration Appeal Division which has equitable discretion. While I am hopeful as to the outcome in this particular case, individuals who are contemplating commiting misrepresentation - or even being parsimonious with the truth in their dealings with Canadian immigration - should know that the period of inadmissibility following a determination of misrepresentation has been increased from two years to five. It is invariably better to be upfront with Citizenship and Immigration Canada or the Canada... Read more →

Unfairly deported, family can come back -- if they pay up

Five years ago the Benhumda family of 6 was deported back to Libya after losing their refugee claim in Canada. The father's patriarch, Adel Benhmuda was imprisoned and tortured upon return to that forsaken country. Now, after the efforts of their legal counsel and other supporters - plus a scathing Federal Court judgment - the government of Canada has allowed the family to return on humanitarian grounds -- provided the family can pay for the cost of their deportation. What this case tells us is there is danger in assuming that Canada's refugee system is infallible. It is not. There are limited safety nets for false negatives such as the Benhmuda case. The Refugee Protection Division is comprised of appointees - I won't call it larded with patronage appointments, that is hopefully in the past - but there is no reason to give the RPD undue deference. Many of its appointees lack a legal background; some are merely the recipients of political favours. The former Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, the Honourable Jason Kenney, has changed refugee adjudication in Canada. These new changes result in hearings in weeks, meaning that claimants have less time to prepare their case. Moreover, Kenney... Read more →

Interview at CIC Calgary

Tomorrow I will be attending at the Citizenship and Immigration office in Calgary with my clients. They have been asked to attend with an officer to review thei pm a residency questionnaire along with other supporting documentation.r residency compliance. As I have written in the past, permanent residents have to be in this country for 2 years out of 5. This requirement is more flexible than in the past where permanent residents had to be in Canada for 6 months out of the year. The clients submitted their application for their permanent resident cards more than 1 year ago; the application was referred to the local office from Sydney. Read more →

Blog Posting - New Rules on Parental Sponsorship

The government has imposed changes to the family class program allowing for sponsorship of parents by permanent residents and citizen. The new program is capped at 5000 applications per year and comes into effect in early 2014: These changes are summarized below: -doubling the amount of time for which sponsors must cover any provincial social benefits incurred by their relatives from 10 years to 20 years. -changing the minimum necessary annual income for sponsors by 30 per cent; and -requiring sponsors to demonstrate they meet the new income threshold for three consecutive years instead of 12 months. It has been argued that the evidence indicates that social welfare claims from parents who were previously sponsored spiked after the 10 year period expired thereby necessitating these changes. The data for this is debatable. Nevertheless, what is not debatable is that the above changes will negatively impacted lower income new Canadians while conferring benefits on higher income new Canadians. Parents and grandparents who come to Canada under this class usually assist their children with free childcare and transmitting language and other cultural values to the new generation. Lower income new Canadians will be left without these intangible benefits and will have to... Read more →

A Refugee's Story

Our client, a mother and grandmother came to Canada from Ethiopia where she and her family were marginalized being of Eritrean ethnicity. In Canada, she made a refugee claim which was granted and she applied for permanent residence status. On that application, she included her children, who had, subsequent to their mother's claim, fled their country of nationality, sojourning in Sudan before making their way as refugees themselves to Uganda. Our client was granted permanent residency in Canada, and for four long years she waited anxiously for Citizenship and Immigration to process the applications for her children. All were refused by a visa officer in Nairobi. The reasons were related but are not reasonable. The visa officer rejected her 17 year old child (her grandchild) for lack of proper adoption documents. After her underage and unwed daughter had a child, our client raised that child as her own. She disclosed her efforts to legalize this relationship by way of a guardianship certificate but the officer rejected it. The visa officer fettered his or her discretion: he or she could have considered the first child as a "de facto" family member given the dearth or paucity of legal adoption documents. A... Read more →

Frontline Pakistan: A Failed State

More instability in Pakistan. Twin blasts in Peshawar last month have resulted in the murder of scores of innocents. We recently handled a refugee claim out of Peshawar involving a Pakistani Christian. The claim was accepted. Not only was the client's testimony credible, he had clear documentary evidence of his efforts at securing justice in a 'land mafia' imbroglio. Canadian journalist Geoffrey Johnston has written about the dire straits of the marginalized in Pakistan. From Ahmadis to Zikris, all are potential targets for radicals and fundamentalists in that failed state. Pakistani writer Zahid Hussain has authored 'Frontline Pakistan', an excellent text that I have read in order to better understand where many of our refugee clients come from. Read more →