Also we had interview and it lasted 10 mins and it was all successful and my partner has arrived in Canada.
Congratulations! Did you ever get the gcms notes and did it have any information related to your issues? Could you share the note (w/o identifying details, of course)?
Did the issue of your previous cohabitation / common law come up in the interview?
this Might help you all there is a huge change:
https://cila.co/the-emancipation-of-conjugal-partners/
The requirement of proving an “impediment to cohabitation” was removed from operational instructions by virtue of a Program Delivery Update (PDU)
Thanks for the link, I'm going to read through the operational manual and take a look. I remain skeptical though that this change will be quite so easily interpreted and implemented as the article implies.
(I don't really see that it applies much to your case anyway - the issue was different. The TRV issue is a bit of red herring in your case in that you ... simply hadn't applied for one. [I remain puzzled why some see this as a challenge - it boils down to applying for one, cost <$100.])
Why? Because by law, they also can't discriminate against opposite-sex partners, and opening as widely as the article implies would mean that - effectively - the 'spousal / common-law' sponsorship cases would be effectively reduced to second place after conjugal. I.e. there is no longer a requirement for marriage or common law. (That article seems to me to be written solely from the perspective of LGBTQ couples, and not much consideration given to how IRCC sees their tasks to ensure program integrity overall - that's not a crtiicism of that article's author, that's what the author seems to do for a living, but a caution about reading it out of context).
Now, don't get me wrong. There are points that sometimes come up here, argued at least by some on this board, that 'impediments to cohabitation' should also be argued to include requiring the
sponsor to move to the country of the PA and reside there until they become common law; that interpretation was and is clearly absurd (I do not know if IRCC has ever argued this).
But with the exception of couples that cannot get divorced (eg PH citizens), the 'apply for a TRV and at least get refused' (impediment) served not as a test of impediment to cohabitation but more as a test of impediment to marriage, because same-sex marriage permitted in every province of Canada.
There have been occasional cases and challenges regarding couples who just don't want to get married and for complicated reasons can't or won't get to common law (12 months continuous cohabitation). A bit weird, I think mad, because people's personal reasons to not want to get married are their own damn problem and do not require government accommodation. (Jurisprudence does not agree with me on this - I think legal civil marriage is a strictly legal and civil arrangement defined by government and not some church of Disney-defined fantasy, and saying you have 'moral or religious' or whatever objections is irrelevant - as silly as saying you have moral objections to drivers' licenses. Government
can require individuals to get drivers' licenses. But again, this is my opinion - Im' not required to agree with the courts, nor they with me)
Anyway back to our sheep: I think the way things end up is that individuals who WISH to apply under the conjugal regime without showing the two impediments traditionally required CAN do so; and IRCC CAN require a lot more (painfully more) proof of relationship, etc. And they can refuse if they're not convinced, and the applicants can appeal; they might even win, at considerable cost of time and $$$.
And those who can demonstrate the two impediments (marriage and immigration) will get approved more quickly with much less chance of refusal. So I'd still recommend trying to show those.
As for how this applies to your case? They could have dinged you both for having been in common law undeclared before you immigrated, and banned from sponsorship forever. They took pity on you. I'm glad of that because I think your mistakes were unintentional. I just don't think it necessarily provides much indication for other (potential) conjugal partners on how to proceed.