Thank you very much.
I've been doing immigration for about 20 years, and I'm a certified specialist in immigration and refugee law. I'm not an expert in violence against women, so I'm going to limit my comments today to things that I've seen on the ground in my practice as a lawyer, real-life examples and things I have actually observed personally.
From my observation, the issue of violence against women in the immigration system has many causes, but it breeds on two factors. First of all, there's a lack of information and education, initially, by women who are immigrating to Canada. Second, there's a situation of isolation in which they find themselves after they immigrate to Canada, which keeps them in a powerless position of being unable to learn about their rights.
From thousands of spousal sponsorships that I've handled personally, I see the solutions in the immigration context as being divided into two separate factors. First of all, what can we do before the woman arrives in Canada to ensure she is arriving in the best possible conditions to be able to understand what her rights are? Second, what can we do after she arrives in terms of integration and settlement into the community, so that even if she doesn't know her rights before she gets here, she will at least somehow learn about them after she arrives?
With the sponsorship process itself, there are some gaps that I think could be addressed, some through regulatory revision and some through simple procedural changes. The first one is sponsorship eligibility. Under our current system, a sponsor must be 18 years old in order to sponsor a spouse. However, the sponsored applicant, the person who is overseas, need only be 16 years old to be sponsored as a married person. I see that as problematic. I think probably the reason it was written that way in the first place is to make it consistent with Canadian law. In most provinces you have to be 16 to legally marry. So that's probably why it was written that way in the first place.
But I think there's a strong case to increase the minimum age from 16 to 18 years. I believe it would disincentivize families overseas from forcing their younger daughters to marry so early. Why should we distinguish between marriages that take place in other countries compared to marriages that take place in Canada? Well, I believe people who get married in Canada have all the legal protections of our system. If they enter into an abusive relationship or if they suffer coercion in entering into a marriage, they can access the Canadian legal system to take care of that. However, women overseas do not have those rights.
I'm not saying we shouldn't recognize marriages as legal if they occur in another country with a woman who is under 18 years of age. But I think what we should do is not allow that person to be sponsored until she at least reaches the age of 18. I believe that being faced with the prospect of waiting two years before sponsorship is allowed to take place would disincentivize families and allow them to allow the girls to mature a little bit and reach the age of 18 before rushing into the marriage.
I should state that not all of my colleagues share this view. Contrary views have been expressed, specifically that it would end up putting a girl possibly in a worse position, that if she's married when she's 16 and then has to wait two years before she can be sponsored, she would certainly be much better protected in Canada compared to outside of Canada. But my view is that it's a good case to increase the age of sponsorship.
If I then turn to looking at the specific immigration processes, simple things such as making amendments to application forms and application kits could really go a long way. For example, what I often see in my practice is that young couples are not filling out their application forms and making their sponsorship applications on their own. It is usually an elder family member, a father, uncle, or a brother, who is doing this on their behalf. The problem is that oftentimes young couples do not understand what has been written in the application and do not understand what they are signing. They may not even have been permitted to read those application forms before they signed.
I believe the application form should be amended to have two different spaces on them. The first would be a space that allows people to write down if they had an interpreter who interpreted the contents of that application form to them in their own language. The second space should be for disclosing whether they had someone assist them with preparing those application forms or if someone prepared those application forms on their behalf.
It's not going to be a foolproof solution, but at minimum it's better than the system we have now where people who don't speak English at all sign the application form stating that the contents are true and correct and have no real way of knowing exactly what they have attested to in those application forms. It also allows some accountability later, with someone's signature there as an interpreter; if they did not interpret those forms, it gives someone to go back to, to ask why they didn't do that.
When it comes to consideration of the application, currently many applications are processed without the need for a personal interview. In those cases where a personal interview is required, it is only the foreign national who is required to attend that interview, and the sponsor is not. In fact, most of the time the sponsor is never heard from by the visa officer who is making a decision on the application.
Ideally, I think it would be better to insist on some form of contact with both parties. That does not have to necessarily be a personal interview; it could be something as simple as a phone call to establish contact and make sure there is no situation of coercion or abuse taking place. It should be someone who would speak directly, particularly to the female in the situation, alone, in isolation, without someone being there with her, to make sure that coercion is not taking place.
My issue is what you do in the system when a visa officer does discover that the woman is being coerced or abused. How do you handle that situation? Surely the solution cannot be to send the girl back to her family, in shame, with a refusal letter stating that she disclosed the abuse to the visa officer.
What I think should be on the table for consideration is that an officer might consider applying humanitarian and compassionate consideration to the case as a matter of routine. That is not to say that it has to be successful in every case, but I think an officer should look at whether that might be a possible solution, to allow the girl to immigrate to Canada without having the sponsorship hanging over her head in an abusive situation.
Incidentally, I agree completely with the comments of my friend Ms. Neufeld about the conditional permanent residents. Those domestic violence guidelines need to be clarified.
Finally, the one last recommendation I want to make is that there should be a sponsorship bar for women who have come to Canada, claimed refugee status on the grounds of domestic violence, been accepted, and then a couple of years later want to sponsor the husband who abused her. I do not mean that as a punishment to the woman, but as a means of protecting her. I have personally seen several cases of this happening, where the women come under incredible family pressure to forgive the abuser and to sponsor him to Canada. I believe that putting in a legal barrier to her doing that would relieve her of that obligation, and would relieve her of the family pressure to sponsor someone she probably doesn't want to sponsor in the first place.
I'll confine my comments to that because I think I'm out of time.
