Super Visa applications for visitors to Canada are often rejected

Posted by admin on Mar 14th, 2012

Toronto Star. Published On Wed Mar 14 2012 Nicholas Keung Immigration Reporter

Caught up in the immigration backlog to sponsor her mom and dad to Canada permanently, Emma Canizales was thrilled to learn of Ottawa’s new visa to facilitate her parents’ visits. The so-called Super Visa allows eligible individuals to travel in and out of Canada to visit their family here over a 10-year period — with up to two years for each stay — while their sponsorship applications are processed.

“We met all the requirements and had no doubt my parents would get the visa,” said Canizales, who came to Toronto from Honduras in 2001 and now works as an accountant in Vancouver.

When the new visa was announced in November, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney touted it as the “most generous” visa provision for travellers to Canada.

“Even if they’ve been waiting for several years for a permanent residency application, they will be able to come to Canada for extended visits, so long as they meet the health care and other requirements,” Kenney said at the time.

That obviously isn’t true for Canizales, whose father Jose Alfredo Canizales Giron, 70, and mother Emma Luisa Fonseca De Canizales, 69, recently got a refusal letter from Citizenship and Immigration Canada. The couple had applied to join their family here in 2008 under family reunification.

In a form letter, officials denied their visa application, citing their “family ties in Canada and in your country of residence” and “length of proposed stay in Canada.”

Canizales said her siblings are all in Canada and they had invited the parents to visit from March through November, for nine months.

“We fly to see our parents at least once a year. It costs us thousands of dollars for our trip. It is much cheaper for them to come and see all of us,” said Canizales.

“We paid $6,000 for our parents’ health insurance coverage in Canada and $2,200 for their return flight. I don’t know if we can get our money back.”

While Liza Parekh was grateful her mother, Meena, 57, arrived from India last month on the Super Visa to help her with the birth of her first child due in April, she was shocked border officials limited the woman’s stay to six months.

“What is the point of having the Super Visa if they only give six months like all the other temporary visas?” asked the Regina IT consultant, whose husband is a health care project manager.

“We’ll have to do all the paper work again for an extension. We are not sure if they would grant it. It’s so stressful,” added Parekh, who has been diagnosed with gestational diabetes and is counting on her mother to care for her and the baby.

Since November, Ottawa has stopped accepting new sponsorship applications for parents and grandparents in order to halt the growing backlog, which now stands at 168,500. It plans to accept between 21,800 and 25,000 applications in the category in 2012, up from 15,326 in 2010.

As of February, 1,361 Super Visa applications have been assessed, with 313 — or 23 per cent — of the cases refused. In comparison, Canada rejects 20 per cent of the 1 million temporary resident visa applications it receives yearly.

While officials cannot comment on individual cases, a department spokesperson said Canada Border Services Agency is responsible for determining a visitor’s authorized length of stay in Canada.

In a recent report on immigration backlog, the Conservative-majority parliamentary committee on citizenship and immigration recommended the Super Visa be widely promoted and kept as a permanent program.

It also suggested the federal government to look into Australia’s “balance of family” test, which assesses sponsorship applications based on the number of children an applicant has in Australia. The test requires that at least half of the children must be permanent residents in Australia to qualify.

Comments are closed.