On June 18, 2019 Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada revamped its caregiver programs. Gone was the requirement that employers first obtain a Labour Market Impact Assessment and that caregivers work in Canada without their families for at least two years before they could apply for permanent residency. Instead, caregivers can now immediately apply for permanent residency if they have a job offer or Canadian work experience in an eligible caregiver occupation and if they meet minimum education and language proficiency requirements and come to Canada with their families right away. The new caregiver programs have existed for about four months now and it is too early to determine whether they have been a success. An issue that has arisen, however, is the issue of employers and applicants demonstrating that their job offers are genuine. How the Caregiver Programs Work Canada now has two caregiver programs. The first is the Home-Child Care Provider Pilot. The second is the Home Support Worker Pilot. A maximum of 2,750 applications are accepted per year under each stream. In both programs, applicants must demonstrate through standardized language testing that they have Initial Intermediate English or French ability, also known as Canadian Language Benchmark 5, and … Read More
Assessing the Genuineness of a Work Permit Offer of Employment
Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations (the “IRPR“) states that a work permit application must be refused if an officer determines that the offer of employment is not genuine. Section 200(5) of the IRPR states that in order to determine whether an offer of employment is genuine an officer should consider (a) whether the offer is made by an employer that is actively engaged in the business in respect of which the offer is made, (b) whether the offer is consistent with the reasonable needs of the employer, (c) whether the terms of the offer are terms that the employer is reasonably able to fulfill, and (d) the past compliance of the employer with federal or provincial laws that regulate employment. Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Canada’s (“IRCC“) guidelines contain extensive instructions to officers on assessing the genuineness of the offer of employment on a work permit application. Actively Engaged In order to demonstrate that an employer is actively engaged in the business an employer must do all of the following: have an operating business; provide either a good or a service; and have a physical work location in Canada where the temporary worker will work. The following are some red flags that … Read More
Genuineness and Primary Purpose – The Disjunctive Test – Section 4(1) of the Regulations
Regulation 4(1) of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations (“IRPR“) state that: 4. (1) For the purposes of these Regulations, a foreign national shall not be considered a spouse, a common-law partner or a conjugal partner of a person if the marriage, common-law partnership or conjugal partnership (a) was entered into primarily for the purpose of acquiring any status or privilege under the Act; or (b) is not genuine. The primary purpose test and the genuineness test are determined with respect to different time-frames. As the Federal Court noted in Idrizi v. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2019 FC 1187 The relevant time for the primary purpose test is in the past (i.e. the time of the marriage); the relevant time for the genuineness test is the present (i.e. the time of the decision). Evidence that a marriage is not genuine can support the inference that it was entered into primarily for an immigration purpose. The converse is also true. these determinations can be exceedingly difficult. Officers must “proceed cautiously and carefully, ever aware of the need to facilitate family reunification, while at the same time safeguarding the integrity of the immigration process” (at 1944). There will rarely be direct evidence of an improper purpose. Instead, normally … Read More
Significant Changes Coming to the Spousal-Sponsorship Program – Conditional PR and Sponsorship Bars
Fresh off his efforts to crack down on crooked consultants, and having just introduced legislation to deter “bogus refugees,” Jason Kenney, the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, is now focusing his scopes on deterring sham marriages. He has made (or is in the process of making) two significant changes to Canada’s spousal-sponsorship program. While both of his reforms will have its critics, the changes are likely to have the overwhelming support of the Canadian public, and continue the Conservative government’s trend of harmonizingCanada’s immigration system with other Western democracies. The first change is a five-year sponsorship bar for recently sponsored spouses. A previously-sponsored spouse will now be barred from sponsoring a new spouse or partner for the first five years that the previously sponsored spouse is a permanent resident. The government’s objective is to prevent an individual who has been sponsored from divorcing the sponsor and shortly thereafter getting married and sponsoring someone else. This change took affect on March 2, 2012. If you were in the process of preparing a spousal-sponsorship application, and this change applies to you, then I’m sorry toinform you that there was no grace period. You will (likely) have to wait until you have been … Read More