Stewart Sharma Harsanyi Immigration Law Firm Blog

(More) Changes coming to the Family Class

More changes are coming to the Family Class, but it's hard to say whether they will be an improvement over the much derided lottery. I shared my thoughts with Licia Corbella of the Calgary Herald: ...on Monday, beleaguered Calgary Centre MP Kent Hehr announced locally the scrapping of the Liberals’ unpopular lottery system for the family class category of immigrants — made up mostly of parents, grandparents and siblings under the age of 22, hoping to reunite with their Canadian citizen family members. In essence, the feds have replaced one unpopular and unfair immigration system with another unfair immigration system. As Calgary immigration lawyer Raj Sharma describes it, “pick your poison.” The Harper government suspended the family class program for two years, restarting it in 2014 to deal with a backlog of more than 120,000 applications and then introduced a limit of 5,000 parents or grandparents starting in 2014. Hehr announced that now the government will accept 20,000 sponsorship applications next year, up from a cap of 17,000 introduced in July. Sharma is wary of the government throwing out bigger numbers to virtue signal prior to next year’s election. “If you can take 20,000 and process them in a reasonable... Read more →

The End of the Lottery System - Changes to Parents/Grandparents family class sponsorship - Interview with Danielle Smith August 21, 2018

Danielle Smith: The bad and the ugly today. We are going to start off with [inaudible 00:00:02]. I think one of the things that we forget, especially with all the turmoil that the liberals have created around the issue of illegal migrants, irregular migrants, family reunification, refugees, fast-track program, that we actually have a pretty good immigration system. Remember, during the campaign, Donald, in the US, Donald Trump said, "Hey, we need a system that's more like Canada," because we do have ... We try to match our immigration system to be able to bring in the kind of individuals that our economy needs, that are going to be able to integrate well. There's a point system ... that we give more points for education and for factors that will allow for integration. So the immigration system is actually pretty darn good and worth emulating and worth celebrating except for when the liberals screw it up, which it appears that they did. I don't know how this one got off my radar. I should've known about it because I talk to Raj Sharma about it all the time. And maybe he mentioned it, and I didn't understand the full ramifications... Read more →

Interview on the Ryan Jespersen Show - August 7, 2018 Discussing Saudi-Canadian Relations -Such as They Are

Let's turn our attention to matters of international news. You heard over the weekend the kingdom of Saudi Arabia expelling Canada's ambassador and diplomats to that country and pulling back what turns out to be more than 15,000 students, Saudi students that are attending universities and colleges here in Canada, many of them benefiting from the King Abdullah Scholarship Program, which covers tuition, flights and accommodations, a stipend for living expenses. A small portion of the students are actually Saudi doctors who are here in Canada training for specialization, this administered through the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. Not a lot of people are talking about the fact that these doctors, who typically would return back to Saudi Arabia to practice, are actually working in Canadian hospitals, 15 of them serving about 20,000 Canadian patients. So some of these story lines will be significant. Some of them maybe not so much. Many people are arguing that Saudi Arabia's move actually really doesn't matter to Canada at all. We thought we'd hit this from a number of different angles and so in about 10 minutes' time, we're gonna talk to [Amir Adoran 00:01:19] from the University of Ottawa.... Read more →