‘It was a great surprise’
Hungarian teen granted permanent residency after long battle
Okotoks, Alta. — Kitti Toris and her family popped a bottle of champagne at their home in Okotoks to celebrate the end of a more than four-year-long battle to see the teen officially granted access to live in Canada permanently.
It’s been a long and stressful journey since Toris came to Canada in 2016 on a sixmonth visitor visa sponsored by her sister and brother-inlaw, Viktoria and Laszlo Radi, with whom she’s lived since she was a young child.
In mid-November, the family received confirmation that Toris had been granted permanent residency in Canada.
“It’s been a ride,” the now 18-year-old Toris said, laughing. “It was a great surprise, a nice Christmas present and it was definitely a weight off our shoulders.”
Back in 2016, the Radis helped Toris apply for a study visa, a temporary residence permit and a permanent residence permit. The applications spent years being processed and eventually the study and temporary residence permits were denied in December 2019.
In the refusal letter, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), ordered the then 16-year-old to return to Hungary.
“It was obvious that she was our daughter; we were effectively her parents, but they just didn’t understand,” Laszlo Radi, a Canadian citizen, said adding it was upsetting that the government was ordering a child “who had nowhere to go” back to Hungary.
Andréa de Rocquigny, a lawyer at dRN Law who helped the family through their appeal process, said the teen could have left the country and come back but that’s not a risk the family was willing to take.
“From conversations with Immigration, they felt she could just get up and go and come back ... Who wants to
do that when her status was not concrete and whenever a person leaves Canada, unless you’re a citizen, you’re not guaranteed re-entry,” she said.
The couple had not formally adopted Toris, which would have taken years and been costly, but were her legal guardians, making the situation “difficult,” de Rocquigny said.
“Because she was not a true child (of the Radis), per se, they requested humanitarian and compassionate consideration to overcome the fact that she was not part of that definition of a child ... And they were successful,” she said, adding the success rate of this particular consideration is only about five per cent.
De Rocquigny said Toris’ is a special case and these processes “aren’t normally this complicated,” adding the Canadian government should look to change their definitions for cases like this.
“There’s a lot of countries out there that don’t allow for full adoption, yet there are people who do take care of or end up having full guardianship of a sibling, cousins, etc., and it would be nice to have a little bit more flexibility,” she said.
The family said they owe a lot of their success to the help of their community and an eager politician.
John Barlow, MP for the riding of Foothills, was instrumental in helping Toris get the word out about her struggle to gain permanent residence status and advocated on the family’s behalf. Without him, and the support of the Okotoks community, Radi said none of this would have been possible.
“We are very happy and thankful for the people supporting us because without them, this wouldn’t have come true.”
Toris, who is set to graduate high school this year in Okotoks, plans to apply for Canadian citizenship in the next three years when she’s eligible to do so.