Late by a day, a family’s hearts broken for a year
Calgary man’s hopes to sponsor parents could be dashed by missing immigration department’s narrow application window by 24 hours
Amix-up in the mail could mean a year of heartbreak for one man hoping to bring his parents to Canada.
Because of a mistake by a courier, Amarjeet Saini’s application to the immigration department’s parent and grandparent sponsorship program was late by a single day. Space in the government program is so limited that he fears the 24hour delay will mean he’ll be forced to wait another year to apply.
Saini, a 41-year-old physical therapist, is desperate for his mom and dad to permanently join him and his wife, Mitali, in Calgary. He said that since the sudden death of his brother last June, his father Samarsingh, 73, and mother, Balwinder Kaur, 63, have no family back home with them in Saharanpur, India.
“Seeing their grief and everything, I’m so fearful to leave them alone over there,” he said.
As the Star reported Wednesday, since 2014 the government has accepted only 5,000 applications to the program each year, and this year cut off further applications after only three days, by which time 14,000 people had already applied.
According to The Canadian Press, hundreds of applicants paid local courier companies up to $400 to wait for hours outside the government processing centre in Mississauga and deliver their applications as soon as it opened at 8 a.m. on Jan. 4.
But Saini, who came to Canada in 2003, lives thousands of kilometres from the government office, and didn’t know about the local couriers in the GTA.
“Parents and grandparents are the cornerstone of our families . . . An arbitrary cap does not help solve the problem.”
JENNY KWAN NDP IMMIGRATION CRITIC ON ‘FIXING’ THE FEDERAL REUNIFICATION PROGRAM
He used Purolator instead, and watched in alarm as the company’s online tracking system showed his paperwork still hadn’t left Alberta the day the program opened. The company later apologized and explained the delay was caused by a “mixed connection” at one of its facilities.
The forms didn’t arrive until Jan. 5, a day after they were supposed to, and he fears he wasn’t among the first 5,000. The Liberal government’s pledge to double the quota to 10,000 has given him a sliver of hope he made the cut, but he’s not holding his breath.
“To me it doesn’t look like a fair scenario, to be honest,” he said. “The odds are heavily weighted against me.”
Saini said the current system leaves applicants “at the mercy of the courier companies,” and favours those in the GTA who know local carriers willing to take cash to wait in line.
His parents are currently visiting him on a temporary visa, but will soon have to return to India. If his sponsorship application is rejected this year, he’ll have to wait until the program opens again in 2017, which he said puts him “365 days behind.”
“My only fear is that if something goes wrong with my dad, who will take care of my mom? I can’t leave my home and I can’t leave everything over in Canada and go back to India,” he said.
Asked about the sponsorship program in Ottawa on Wednesday, Immigration Minister John McCallum said he “accepts” there could be a better process.
“If you’re telling me that we could find a better way to handle this, so that people don’t have to pay these high fees to couriers, then I accept the point.”
But any change the government implements likely won’t affect those who missed out this year. “The exercise has been completed now for 2016, so we will have a year to figure out ways in which we might improve that process for the next year,” McCallum said.
McCallum also noted that the Lib- erals have pledged to “immediately” raise the number of applications allowed to at least 10,000 a year. According to the minister, the new quota will be formally confirmed when the Liberals unveil their overall immigration targets for 2016 in the coming weeks. The immigration department has posted a notice to its website saying it’s holding on to the first 10,000 applications submitted this year, pending the announcement.
Wednesday afternoon, the New Democrats issued a statement calling on the government to hold public consultations on how to “fix” the reunification program.
“Parents and grandparents are the cornerstone of our families. They are a key part of our support network, community and economy. An arbitrary cap does not help solve the problem,” NDP immigration critic Jenny Kwan said in the release.
“The Liberals need to provide a solution to address this and to ensure all families are reunited in a fair and timely fashion.”
Successive Conservative and Liber- al governments have grappled with how to address overwhelming demand for the parent and grandparent sponsorship program.
In 2011, the Conservatives put a moratorium on new submissions, saying the government needed time work through a backlog that had ballooned to 165,000 applications. At the time, the waiting period for processing applications was estimated at eight years.
At the same time the government introduced a new 10-year “super visa” that allowed parents and grandparents to stay in Canada for up two years at a time. When the government began accepting applications again in 2014, it imposed the 5,000spot quota.
Robin Seligman, a Toronto immigration lawyer, said it’s necessary to keep a cap on applications. “You could overwhelm the whole system with parents and grandparents. I don’t think it’s unfair to have targets,” she said.
But if quotas are set, the government needs to process them in a timely manner, she argued. Wait times for parent and grandparent sponsorships are currently more than four years.
Mario D. Bellissimo, of the Bellissimo Law Group, suggested a fairer process than the current first-come, first-served system would be to open the program to applications for several months at a time, and then pick which submissions are processed via a lottery.
“You’re still going to have a number of people disappointed,” he said, but a lottery would help “avoid the chaos” of all applicants scrambling to get their paperwork in on a single day. With files from Bruce Campion-Smith and Nicholas Keung