Marriages of convenience have been combatted before the visa through two different procedures.
The first was the careful scrutiny by visa officers, who have the power to refuse the issuing of a visa if they believe that the marriage is non-genuine. That has been happening as long as I've been practising immigration law. Of course, the sponsor has an appeal, and then the immigration appeal division decides whether the marriage is genuine or not. That process exists independently of the conditional visa.
The other important fact is that there's also the possibility of enforcement action being taken. I was in Vancouver last week on a case where there was an allegation that someone got permanent residence based upon a non-genuine marriage. He was subject to deportation. When I started practising immigration law, that virtually never happened, and now it's happening all the time.
The ability to enforce and the ability to deport people who engage in marriages of convenience exist independently of the conditional visa. All the conditional visa does is make it easier. If you leave prior to the two years, I assume there's a presumption that it's a non-genuine marriage, and you're deported unless you can prove that you've been the victim of abuse.
I understand the motivation behind it, as you've said, but the difficulty with it is that the byproduct of the conditional visa is that we're perpetuating the abuse. So as a committee, as a society, we have to make a value judgment at the end of the day. It's not that we're without mechanisms of enforcement. We have mechanisms of enforcement. The mechanisms of enforcement are the refusal of the visa overseas and the admissibility proceedings.
Are those sufficient? I would say they are. Also, I would say that when you do a cost-benefit analysis of adding the conditional visa, the benefit of making it easier to deport someone if you believe it's a marriage of convenience is outweighed by the danger. I ask you this. If one woman is forced to stay in an abusive relationship and gets killed, is that what it's going to take for us to get rid of the conditional visa? I mean, that's really...that's my sense.