National Post (National Edition)
FALSE TEMPLES
Immigration fraudsters are using phoney Sikh houses of worship and Ottawa is ignoring it
Judging from its online presence, the Sikh temple that purportedly sits on the edge of this Niagara-region border town is a lovely spot.
“They serve food all time with good flavoured chutney and the taste is superb,” says an August 2019 review on the Fort Erie Khalsa Darbar's Facebook page. “The place of god to relax and calm your mind.”
The social media page and the temple's website reinforce the pleasant image with photos of devotees and succulent-looking food.
What actually exists at its address in Fort Erie is something else: A long-abandoned motel surrounded by scrub land overgrown with weeds, and fronted by a no-trespassing sign.
The land is zoned rural. “A place of worship,” says Janine Tessmer, a spokeswoman for the town, “would be considered a zoning infraction.”
There is no temple, in other words. Yet Fort Erie Khalsa Darbar, incorporated as a federal non-profit in April 2019, and granted religious charity status this February, has sponsored at least three priests to come here from India on special visas issued by Ottawa.
Directors of the Fort Erie temple — called a gurdwara in Punjabi — say they fully intend to open it one day and thought it would be running by the time their priests arrived.
Representatives of the country's many functioning gurdwaras say they know little about the new facility, and couldn't comment on its operation. But they warn that temples by name only, operating “under false pretences” are a major problem, charging priests, real or not, tens of thousands of dollars each for sponsorships that can lead to visas and a cherished foothold in Canada.
They also say federal governments have long ignored their warnings about the unique, religiously inflected form of immigration fraud.
“The sharp rise in cases coming forward in the public regarding potential immigrants paying tens of thousands of dollars to these societies in order to secure work permits is shocking and undermining the immigration process and laws,” the heads of the Ontario Gurdwaras Committee and B.C. Gurdwaras Council said in a letter this July to Immigration
Minister Marco Mendicino.
“Potential immigrants to Canada are often fleeing poverty, state sponsored violence, genocide and oppression and to be further marginalized by this type of illegal and fraudulent behaviour … is unacceptable,” they said.
In lower mainland British Columbia, a priest from India says he had to pay $29,000 to have gurdwara leaders sponsor him for a work permit to preach in what turned out to be a phoney temple. He says he and his young family are now destitute.
Directors of the Fort Erie gurdwara deny that money changed hands with the priests they sponsored, and that incomplete renovations on that vacant building in Fort Erie meant the men could not work there.
Bachittar Saini, the temple president, said he is covering all the project's expenses from his own pocket as a gift to the area's small Sikh population — non-existent in 2011, according to the most recent federal household survey that canvassed religious beliefs.
“When you are serving the community, you don't have to be only serving the Sikh community,” Saini said. “It could be anyone, black, brown, white, whatever. We don't ask `Are you Sikh, are you Christian, are you Muslim?'”
Meanwhile, there's evidence that at least one of the three priests may now be working as a truck driver, and allegations he tried to obtain a visa fraudulently four years ago. Saini says the preachers have all disappeared, and that he reported them missing to immigration authorities.
Matieu Genest, a spokesman for Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino, said Friday the government would not comment on any ongoing investigations, but takes allegations of fraud seriously and “constantly monitors” to ensure the safety of people using the system and safeguards the system itself.
“We encourage anyone who suspects immigration fraud to contact the Canada Border Services Agency's Border Watch,” he said.
Genest said the program for bringing religious workers to gurdwaras is important to the Sikh community, and is regularly reviewed to ensure its integrity. Officials work closely with the community “to identify and eliminate opportunities for abuse.”
Two of the Fort Erie gurdwara directors have links to Navdeep Bains, a Liberal MP and minister of innovation, science and industry. President Bachittar Saini and the minister's father, Balwinder, were advisers to the same slate of candidates in a board election last year at a large gurdwara in Mississauga. Fort Erie director Bahadur Bains is uncle to Balkar Bains, Liberal riding association president in Bains' Mississauga-Malton constituency.
But John Power, a spokesman for the minister, said he had nothing to do with the Fort Erie project and no one on his staff helped in any way to obtain visas for the priests.
Gurdwaras are the places of worship for Canada's 700,000 Sikhs, but also serve as community hubs, offering food to people in need and hosting weddings and funerals at halls that are often part of the temple complex.
To meet the demand for such services, many temples sponsor jathas — groups of three priests — to come from India for stays of about six months in Canada.
They are admitted under various types of work permits, a Canadian consulate in India co-ordinating with gurdwaras to ensure no one overstays their visa, said Béatrice Fénelon, an Immigration Refugees and Citizenship spokeswoman.
In total, 519 work permits or permit extensions were issued to religious workers from India between 2018 and July this year, while 70 were granted permanent resident status, she said.
The gurdwara associations say in their letter that a system developed in 2012 to deter abuse had some early success. But now, they say, there are “hundreds if not thousands” of non-profit Sikh religious societies that are using their paper credentials to make money off of would-be immigrants.
They call for a crackdown to ensure perpetrators do not “continue to financially gain from this illegal activity.”
“There are so many gurdwaras registered but they are not existing any place. They are fraud,” said Amarjit Singh Mann of the Ontario Gurdwaras Committee. “They rent a place in the plaza or somewhere else, and they say this is a gurdwara … but there is nothing.”
Saini, the Fort Erie temple president, is a realtor and also director of a numbered company — 2323266 Ontario Inc. — that bought the property in 2019 for $310,000, according to land registry records. All the gurdwara's board members are based in Brampton, 150 kilometres away.
Fort Erie is a curious location for a Sikh religious facility. The 2016 census found just 10 residents whose mother tongue is Punjabi — which could also include Hindus and Muslims — while Statistics Canada's 2011 national household survey revealed zero adherents of the Sikh religion. The town's population has increased little since then.
Director Bahadur Bains suggested otherwise, estimating that there are “300 or 400” Sikhs in the town of 30,000. The gurdwara would also be of benefit, he added, to Sikhs in Belleville, though that city is 340 kilometres away in eastern Ontario.
The temple's online presence gives no hint that it exists in the record books only. The administrator of its Facebook page began posting messages there in April 2019, and continued until as recently as the middle of September.
Then there are the reviews. That one posted in August 2019, in praise of the temple's food and meditative ambience, was posted by Buy Sell on Time, a company run by president Saini.
At the property itself, site of the former Tatler Motel, someone was working inside the building without a permit in 2019, prompting the town to issue an order to comply in September, then a stop-work order in November, said Tessmer.
The structure looks thoroughly abandoned now. But the sponsored priests still received their visas last year.
Saini said the stop-work order prevented the building being ready to accommodate them and a potential congregation. He said he now plans to tear down the motel and build anew, but said work was halted because of the pandemic.
In fact, Ontario allowed construction to proceed throughout the COVID-19 lockdown.
Meanwhile, no one has applied to change the zoning to make opening a temple there legitimate, said Tessmer.
Where the sponsored priests are now is also murky.
Unable to take up work in Fort Erie, they found jobs at a gurdwara in Brampton called Jot Parkash, then vanished, said Saini. But Jot Parkash spokesman Satbir Singh said he's never heard of them, or the Fort Erie facility.
A Windsor, Ont., businessman, Amarjit Grewal, initially confirmed to the National Post that one of the preachers was working for him as a truck driver. Then, in a subsequent interview, he denied that was true, saying the man, whom the National Post could not reach and is not naming, was at a temple in Mississauga.
In 2016, a priest of the same name and two jatha members forged letters from Canada's largest gurdwara — Ontario Khalsa Darbar (OKD) — in a bid to win visas, the temple alleged in a letter to immigration officials at the time. Their warning seems to have been for naught, as the same preachers managed to get visas later after convincing a different temple to sponsor them, said a followup letter to Immigration.
“It would be greatly appreciated if you can address this matter promptly and help us eradicate fraudulent behaviour,” the OKD gurdwara wrote in April 2017.
It's “mind-boggling” that despite the warnings the same priests are now back in Canada, granted visas after being sponsored by a temple that does not physically exist, said Jaspal Bal, an advisor to Ontario Khalsa Darbar.
When he found out they had returned, Bal said, “I thought `man oh man, what is going on' ”?
THE SHARP RISE IN CASES COMING FORWARD IN THE PUBLIC REGARDING POTENTIAL IMMIGRANTS PAYING TENS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS TO THESE SOCIETIES IN ORDER TO SECURE WORK PERMITS IS SHOCKING AND UNDERMINING THE IMMIGRATION PROCESS AND LAWS.