Citizenship and Immigration committee  International students are clearly very desirable people to come to Canada. They're young. They have studied in Canada. They have work experience in Canada. And yet, many of them can't get through the express entry system because of things like age. When you're in your thirties,

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm not aware of a program where there was low-skilled work under the federal skilled worker program. That may have been before my time. But I would certainly recommend a program where people are allowed to have a clear path toward permanent residency, especially people who have

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes. I think it's a faulty assumption that we only need a certain group of people who already have work in Canada. Many provinces now, with their provincial nominee programs, don't care if it's defined as high-skilled or low-skilled work. If they have a job offer, they should be

Citizenship and Immigration committee  My change is.... Why are we making that distinction? If someone has a job offer and an LMIA, which shows that Canadians can't do the job or aren't willing to do the job, then we need them in Canada, period.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes. When the law is such that people cannot stay after they work.... For example, there was a change a few years ago by the Conservatives that limited the workers to staying for four years. The “four-in, four-out” rule forced thousands of workers to suddenly wake up one day and

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you very much for having me here. My name is Elizabeth Long. I'm an immigration lawyer. I've been certified by the Law Society of Ontario as a specialist in immigration law. Throughout the last 14 years, I've worked with thousands of workers to help them immigrate to Canada

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think the government should stand out of the way of love. We cannot be in the position of trying to regulate who is to fall in love with who and stand in the way of families reunifying. This is not an economic category. This is family reunification, and it's a different purpose

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm sorry, I disagree with that. Love can happen in arranged marriages as well but that's not our decision, to decide whether or not two people can be together because of their language requirements or how much they know. What if you have a child in the marriage? What would hap

Citizenship and Immigration committee  In my experiences, I have had quite a few sponsors come to me saying, “I was tricked into getting married.” The problem with this is not that they didn't stay together, the problem with this is that officers would not act. The mechanism was there in law for them to take the spons

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you. I think the New Zealand experience is very important. It's about what priority we put on things. If we feel that it's important to allow women who are abused and their children who are with them an avenue to leave their abusers, then it's very important for them to pr

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I have not dealt with many proxy marriages in my experience, but here's the thing. I don't know that being married over the phone would be any different from someone standing next to them in the aisle in a church or in a mosque. If there is abuse in a situation, there will be abu

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's right.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes. Here's the thing. If it is actual marriage fraud, under the previous laws, we can strip someone of their permanent residence based on misrepresentation. So if it is marriage fraud, we can use other laws to do that. Really the harmful result of conditional sponsorship is cl

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you very much for inviting me here today. I am a lawyer and I practise exclusively in immigration law. I'm also certified by the law society as a specialist in citizenship and immigration law. In my practice I have quite a few clients who come from women's shelters and fr

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's not a matter of whether we respect visa officers or not. I have a lot of respect for visa officers. But people make wrong decisions, and when people make a wrong decision, you need to have a way to address that error fairly and quickly. It is in Canada's interest for tourist