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©Gregory James, June 2006 This past week the Federal Court of Appeal upheld one of Canada’s worst immigration policies. The outrageously long processing times for sponsoring parents are horrible for many reasons. One of the worst is that some dependants who qualify when the application is filed can be deleted from the application later. I am referring to children who are at least 22 years old when the application is filed, and qualify as dependants because they are full time students. The problem is that if they stop being students the visa office will delete them from the application. The rest of the family can still come to Canada, but the former student must be left behind. But it is hard to maintain full time student status when it takes visa offices five years to process these cases. And processing times are getting longer. A lower court judge recognized the absurdity of this situation. She ruled that a dependant was okay as long as he or she was a full time student when the application was filed. It did not matter is the dependant was still a student five or six years later. This ray of hope was snuffed out by the Court of Appeal this week when it said that the dependant must stay in school for the whole time the application is pending, even if it takes six years or more. This decision puts the onus squarely on the government. All they have to do is change a regulation. It’s time to make that change.
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