Immigration Canada responds

Re: No Residency For Deaf Man With Trouble Speaking, June 18. It is unfortunate that in this article, the decision made by a Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) officer and upheld upon judicial review by a Federal Court judge has been mischaracterized. CIC did not reject a hearing-impaired applicant for an inability to speak or listen. Rather, dmitri Smirnov’s application to the Canadian experience Class was refused because he did not meet the program’s minimum language requirements for the two parts of the language test he did take, i.e. reading and writing.

The Federal Court reviewed the decision by immigration officials and upheld it as reasonable: “The officer considered the [American Sign Language] ASL scores, as well as the reading and writing scores, which were equal to and lower than the pre- scribed [Canadian Language Benchmark] CLB of 4, respectively. It was reasonable for the officer to come to the conclusion that the applicant did not meet the language requirements based on these two (2) results alone.” details of the decision can be publicly obtained on the Federal Court’s website.

Justice Boivin also found insufficient evidence of Mr. Smirnov’s Charter rights being violated: “Given the factual pattern of this case and the lack of evidence adduced by the applicant with regard to the alleged violation of his section 15 Charter right to equality, the Court must decline to address the Charter question raised by the applicant.”

CIC is aware of the challenges that hearing-impaired applicants face during language testing. The department assesses on a case-bycase basis applicants who are unable, even with the provision of special accommodations, to take one or more portions of the test. In this case, we would encourage Mr. Smirnov to retake the reading and writing parts of the language test at his earliest convenience. Dawn Edlund, Associate Assistant Deputy Minister, Operations Sector Citizenship and Immigration Canada, Ottawa.