Woman fights to bring husband to Canada

An Aylmer woman has tried for 28 months to get her Kurdish husband into Canada — a delay casting doubt on their whole future — just as the Immigration Department has been crowing about a speedier spousal unification process.

Desperate for answers, Gholi Fathoullahnejad, 46, appealed to the Citizen and her MP for help after months of frustrating silence from officials at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.

“I’m so confused,” she said recently, sorting through documents at her kitchen table. “Everything is on hold. I cannot handle this anymore.”

The story has several twists and turns but the bottom line is easy to read: After marrying Taher Rahimi, 42, in Denmark in February 2015, they’ve only spent a handful of weeks together. Rahimi resides in Germany. An ocean apart — a rocky start for any marriage.

“Every day, my life is fighting and crying,” said Fathoullahnejad, who has a 10-year-old daughter at home, no steady work and few funds for regular European visits. “I’m tired of this situation and I don’t know how to handle it.”

She said her husband, who speaks little English, mistakenly thinks she is not doing enough at her end to make his immigration proceed. The uncertainty, she says, makes it impossible for her to get on with her life, or for Rahimi to make even mediumterm plans in Germany — expecting, as he does, to soon uproot for North America.

“Twenty-eight months?” said Ottawa immigration lawyer Julie Taub, who is not involved in the case. “To me, it’s inconceivable. All our spousal sponsorships take six months to a year, max. Something is missing here.”

Now a Canadian citizen, Fathoullahnejad is originally from the Kurdish region of Iran. She arrived in Canada in 1991, married her first husband in 1992 and the couple went on to have three children. She was divorced in 2013. She travelled to Germany some months later and was reunited with Rahimi, a childhood acquaintance from the same region of Iran.

Once in the Kurdish army, he had fled and taken refuge with a large group of displaced Kurds in Germany, settling in Cologne, no doubt displeasing Iranian authorities, she speculates. “You can’t get information from the country you ran away from.”

After getting married in Denmark, the couple began the immigration process, applying in May 2015 for his permanent residence, which resulted in an interview in a Canadian immigration office in Vienna on Nov. 12, 2015.

“A positive eligibility decision was made on the application,” the Immigration Department responded in an email. “At that point in time, background checks commenced. Additional documents were requested for this purpose, and received on April 21, 2016. At the current time, security screening remains ongoing.”

(Rahimi signed a consent form permitting the department to answer specifics about this case.)

Well, ongoing “security screening” was the department’s position on June 13, at least. Here was the department’s update the very next day:

“On June 14th, we received an update that security screening for Mr. Rahimi was completed on June 13th. The applicant will now be asked to do medicals.”

Coincidence, surely, after Citizen inquiries and some dogged work by the constituency office of Hull-Aylmer MP Greg Fergus.

It is bittersweet news for Fathoullahnejad. While she is pleased the case appears to be moving ahead, she said her husband already completed a medical in 2015, at some expense. (The medical clearance appears to have expired.) She said he now has to travel about 200 kilometres to be examined by an approved physician, costing hundreds more.

And final approval or departure date? Still unknown.

The department said background checks are conducted with “security partners” to ensure applicants for residency do not have criminal records, haven’t engaged in acts of terrorism, have not violated “human or international rights,” and don’t pose a health threat.

It may be that a stepped-up effort announced by the Immigration Department in December — backed by an extra $25 million in the 2016 budget — is finally having an impact.

The department promised then to cut processing times and backlogs for so-called “spousal immigration” by more than half, also expanding the quota for 2017 from 47,000 to 64,000.

It pledged to process spousal applications within 12 months, down from the average of 18 to 26 months.

Fathoullahnejad, meanwhile, just wants the waiting to end.

“The government is supposed to let people who are married be together.”

Every day, my life is fighting and crying. I’m tired of this situation and I don’t know how to handle it.