‘It is a big relief’: Kurdish husband finally reunites with wife in Aylmer

It took nearly 29 months, but an Aylmer woman has been reunited with her husband, a Kurd who had taken sanctuary in Germany.

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

Finally, the logjam was broken. Fathoullahnejad said her husband, Taher Rahimi, 42, was granted a visa to travel to Canada at the end of July and arrived in Aylmer this week.

“It is a big relief,” she said Thursday.

The couple were married in Denmark in February 2015. Since then, Fathoullahnejad, a Canadian citizen, had been trying to get her husband to Canada under the “spousal immigration” process run by the federal department.

Rahimi’s immigration application was first made in May 2015, followed by an interview in Vienna in November.

The department told the Citizen that, after a tentative approval, background checks started and supporting documents were not received until April 2016, after which more security screening took place.

He was finally approved in midJune 2017, with only a medical examination to be completed. Fathoullahnejad was particularly upset because, for at least a year, she couldn’t get an update from immigration officials and her husband, living in Cologne, was losing patience trying to plan their future.

Ironically, the Immigration Department is in the middle of a renewed effort to speed up spousal immigration, dedicating an extra $25 million in the 2016 budget.

It has promised to cut processing times and backlogs in this category by more than half, also expanding the quota for 2017 from 47,000 to 64,000. The department pledged to process spousal applications within 12 months, down from the average of 18 to 26 months.

Fathoullahnejad said they have already applied for a social insurance number for her husband and are lining up work and Englishlanguage classes.