Thank you.
I'm sorry I tried to interject earlier. When I hear things such as the use of the Internet in order to inform people...we have our clients, and I'm sure the social worker can attest to that. They don't even know how to use public transport because the linguistic issues are so severe, because the isolation is so bad, because very often they are controlled not only by the spouse, but also by the extended family they are living with. So I have my doubts as to whether or not Internet access would ameliorate the situation.
Regarding the clients who we see, particularly in Quebec, we believe that prevention is a better route to go, and we believe the client, the woman, should be part of the sponsorship process right from the beginning. The information should be given to her in the language of origin. It should be followed up after.
With our cultural intermediaries we know for a fact that many times the interview is not done once they reach Canada, or if it is done, it's done in a superficial way. More in-depth information should be given to the women, and they should be an integral part of the sponsorship process. It's something that I think is really not happening now.
If we talk about the arranged and the forced marriages, we have to say that we have, through the intervention of the cultural intermediaries, seen how sponsorship fraud is really an issue within certain communities. Because when we have given the legal information sessions, the issue of sponsorship fraud and also multiple marriages is something that comes out very often. A lot of women, young girls, are sent off to their native countries to get married, and they marry somebody, a Canadian resident. They come back to Canada and they find there's another wife here. So the question is, how does this wife come in? And how did the first wife come in? How have they come in, and how have they been declared by the people in Canada, by the Canadian residency?
