Sponsoring my Japanese Girlfriend as Common Law (Outside vs Inside Application)

[rad33]

Hi Everyone,

I recently stumbled onto this forum while looking for information about sponsoring my Japanese girlfriend as common law. The information on the CIC website is a bit confusing and this looks to be a great place to look for some answers


Background:

My girlfriend has been working under post-graduate work permit for almost three years, and her visa expires this June, 2015. We have been living together since April, 2014, and also work within the same hotel. I understand that with the inbound application, this gives you the benefit of working while waiting for the application, however, there are restrictions on being able to leave the country, thus we are also considering completing the outbound application since there is more flexibility.

We have proof of living together since April, and also we went on a 3 week summer vacation to Japan in August, 2014, to visit her family, and we also took a short trip to the Philippines during that time to meet some of my family. We have records of plane tickets, text conversations on phone, and the support of our family and friends if we need letters written to support our claim. There are also a lot of photographs to show of our relationship, however on the financial side of things we do not have as much proof. What I mean is that our finances are still independent since we don't have a joint bank account, or have mail that is shipped to the same address. I understand that this is important, but we are in the process of starting to combine our resources, but I just wanted to know how much weight this part of the application carries during the decision making process.

Currently my home address is still at my parents house where my bills gets delivered as my permanent address, and also where I pay monthly rent to help out, though for the last year shortly after we met, I have been living there almost 100% of the time. Moving forward we want to move into a new place together, however we want to make sure that we have a good chance that I will be able to successfully sponsor her.

After perusing through some threads on this forum, it seems as if the outside application would be the better choice in our situation. Any suggestions or comments/advice about what we can do to improve our odds of approval would be very much appreciated. Thank you for taking the time to read through this, and I look forward to reading and answering to your replies.



God Bless,

- Radley

 

[Sheps]

Since she is on a PGWP, she will not benefit from implied status for the open work permit if you submit inland. This is because the PGWP is a class that is "not extendable", so if you applied inland, she would have to stop working until the OWP came.

Your options would be to attempt to move her onto a Closed Work Permit or Open Work Permit (depending on what she qualifies for) before the current one expires, however you will have to follow the proper processes for that.

From what it sounds, you might not be able to meet the requirements of common law because you don't have solid proof of cohabitation of man and wife. From another member(Ponga, rchohen, someone else), what they are really looking for is that you are actually man and wife (or man and man/woman and woman, etc) without the paper to prove it. Your relationship isn't suppose to be that of boyfriend/girlfriend, it is suppose to be a marriage like relationship where for personal, religious, etc reasons you do not want to actually get married.

I think you started this process a little too late for common law, is hard to say but depending on what kind of relationship proof, they may not be satisfied you are married. Is there any reason you don't want to get married?

(BTW, my wife is Japanese. We met last year, got married last year, between work and school for her, we finally got her application in, in Feb. The Police Certificate itself took 1 month and was on the verge of expiring, it isn't a quick process, gathering all the documents you require)

 

[Rob_TO]

What proofs do you have that you've been cohabiting since last April? It sounds like you don't have any shared lease/rent agreement, your mail goes to a different address, and no shared financial accounts. If this is accurate it sounds like it will be very tough for you to prove you've actually been living together for 12 continuous months.

The proofs you have mentioned are all just proofs of relationship in general and won't help to prove cohabitation, which is mandatory to have a successful common-law application. You need to start gathering actual evidence of cohabitation as a first step... so start to get things like shared bank or credit card accounts, shared utilities, life insurance of each other, list each other as beneficiaries on anything, change your status to common-law with CRA, add each other to work benefits (if applicable), etc etc.