Marriage of Convenience - Fraud - Misrepresentation! i just reported her to border services for getting her PR and left after only 9 months.

[ValDen]

While no reminder required, I appreciate the thought.

We expect my wife's move to Canada (albeit with but 2 suitcases full of her worldly possessions) to quite likely end up as permanent. While we can perhaps say that honestly, we also have to admit to the fact that if she can't stand the place, then we'll return to live in the Phils. Does admitting to that possibility make us fraudsters? Are we courting a 5, 10 or 100-year ban for the dreaded crime of "misrepresentation"? If Canada refuses to grant a TRV for a prospective immigrant to come take Canada for a test drive, then it cannot come as too much of a shock to discover that some who come with intent to remain, find that they just cannot make that work and they go home.

I know full well I would not commit to a permanent move to another country I had never visited. For me, that applies even to another city or province. I was born in Vancouver, but grew up in Toronto. While in law school in Ontario, I thought about moving back to Vancouver. In those days, by the time you finished law school, you had to decide on province, since it was not easy to be able to practice law in more than one province. So, after first year law, I made a reconnaissance mission to Vancouver to check it out. If I had been told I would have to decide to move to Vancouver permanently, sight unseen, I might have stayed in TO.

This is so true. How can someone make a commitment to a place and want to stay there is never even "tested the waters". And, yes, the TRV thing is a joke. I would like to know who gets these approved, as we even applied and were denied. But our plan is still to live in Canada as this has been my home my whole life and it is a big change for him, but I'm sure he will love it.

 

[armoured]

This is so true. How can someone make a commitment to a place and want to stay there is never even "tested the waters".

This is a red herring and a completely unfounded moral panic (I mean the excessively earnest discussion of this, not your statement). There is no evidence of some wide or serious program by IRCC to deal with straightforward cases of new PRs and/or Canadians sponsoring their spouses from abroad who simply move to Canada and then don't end up staying. Bring your spouse and if it doesn't work out, you / your spouse can almost certainly leave with no issues save some admin headaches and (eventually) losing the PR status.

There ARE modest ongoing efforts to attempt to ensure that the ability to sponsor a spouse isn't abused for purposes of simply 'having' a PR card (eg for international travel purposes) or getting PR status in order to have Canadian healthcare.* One vector, for example, for which there is very modest evidence ('modest' in the sense of 'not very much') is the 'accompany a citizen abroad' exception to the residency obligation - where efforts mainly seem to be about cases where the spouse-PR effectively never lived in Canada at all and/or simply returned to country of origin and resumed previous life.

There are LOTS of people who believe the RO requirements are extremely loose as it is - and some or even LOTS of PRs who perhaps confuse the fact that there is a certain amount of inconvenience involved in renewing PR cards and the like with the concept of 'strict' (so much so that I hesitate to use the word 'enforcement' at all).

*I put the asterisk here because OF COURSE healthcare requirements by province are only loosely linked to the PR residency requirement - mostly only conceptually in that they both require a certain amount of 'residency'. And that in many cases Canadian healthcare is not so fabulous or accessible that it even makes sense for many to pursue this just for healthcare. The reality is that the provinces often don't pursue strict enforcement of their own residency requirements for healthcare for their own reasons (including that enforcement can actually be quite expensive and not 'pay for itself' as often as many think based on their own intuition). That said, there are clearly some cases of abuse/excessively lax enforcement.

So yes, fewer people should get away with receiving paid healthcare they're not technically eligible for. That truism and ~$3 will get you a coffee at starbucks.