Badwal [age 35] met Shahi, 30, online in 2006. She lived in Brampton; he lived in a dusty village in Punjab, India. Soon, they exchanged photographs and were chatting on the phone. In November 2007, Badwal, who then worked for the Royal Bank of Canada, went to India and they got married.
“I totally believed he was the right person for me,” said Badwal. “He was open-minded, nice, attentive ...”
She returned to Canada and, in March 2008, filed an application to sponsor him. In December, the application was rejected because of the age difference and compatibility issues, said Badwal.
I absolutely detest the fact that if you want to sponsor your spouse to come to Canada, Immigration has to approve the match. And they reject applications on such ridiculous grounds as a five-year age difference in a couple in their 30s.
Now you might be thinking "But this guy ended up being a fraud. They were right to reject his application!" But if they were going to reject his application because he's a fraud, it should have been on the grounds that he's a fraud. Using a five-year age difference as a reason to reject an application destroys any credibility they might have had.
As Canadian citizens, we can marry each other as stupidly as we want. I could propose to that scraggly homeless guy who walks around wrapped in a blanket with no pants and offer him an air conditioned apartment and a dental plan in exchange for spider-killing services and the right to use the phrase "my husband" in casual conversation. It would undoubtedly be a foolish thing to do, but at no point in the process would any government official scrutinize our relationship to evaluate whether it's a suitable match.
We also need to be able to enter into international marriages that are suboptimal matches, or foolishly impulsive, or ill-advised, or consensual marriages of convenience. As long as both parties fulfill the sponsorship agreement and they aren't defrauding each other, anything goes. If Immigration truly has to investigate relationships to prevent fraud, they need to figure out a way to detect genuine fraud without deeming invalid perfectly consensual marriages that are beyond the reach of some petty functionary's imagination. If a relationship can be deemed unsuitable because of a five-year age difference, what other perfectly legitimate relationships are being rejected?
Our country decided, long before I was born, that the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation. This should also apply for immigration policy.
4 comments:
Wow. I am so glad you posted this - I had no idea about this policy! I agree with you 100%. How dare the government presume to have any say in personal - I'll go even further - intimate matters such as marriage! For me it's not a stretch to think that a government that has such a policy would also overturn same sex marriages in a heartbeat, if it could.
So many things apply to immigrants that don't apply to Canadian-born Canadians. Immigrants and prospective immigrants aren't supposed to mention it, we're just supposed to be grateful that Canada will accept us at all.
But a 5 year difference in ages is considered a red flag? That's disgraceful.
Perhaps the red-flag was raised in this case because the woman was older than the man, and this is highly unusual in their culture? Just speculating.
If it is that the age difference is unusual, that shouldn't be a red flag! In fact, they should be specifically accommodating to people who want to live their life here in Canada in a way that's unconventional for their culture of origin but unremarkable here. That's kind of what immigration is for.
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