Remi Lariviere, a spokesman for CIC, wrote in an email to Maclean’s that marriages of convenience “victimize Canadian citizens and permanent residents.” Last year, CIC focused renewed attention on the issue by holding consultations with voters to revamp the rules on spousal sponsorship. Under the current regulations, every year, roughly one in five couples see their applications rejected by the government, according to CIC.
But weeding out fraud by gauging people’s true feelings is far from an exact science, and critics say that, aside from making it difficult for the Gemmas and Brents of the world, it implicitly discriminates against global couples. If cross-border weddings have to be about genuine romance, goes the argument, shouldn’t all marriages? And yet there are Canadians within our borders who marry for reasons other than love—in the interests of remaining within a religious community, or entering a certain income group or social background.
Governmental assessments of binational relationships sometimes produce puzzling results. Couples made up of a young foreign man and a considerably older Canadian woman are much more likely to be judged illegitimate and rejected than those where the older spouse is a Canadian man, in Rekai’s experience. And if the government says “nay,” appealing that decision is a bureaucratic exercise that can last years. “It goes completely off the rails,” says Rekai, who has seen this happen to legitimate duos, too.
That’s one reason why, when Kurland sits down with a binational couple, he tells them to consider a pre-nuptial agreement, and then explains how “immigration marriages” differ from regular marriages. “I explain the risks, the process. The up-front costs are greater with global couples because of the cost of the immigration process, flights, travel,” he says.
It doesn’t help international couples that they are such a diverse group, scattered all over the globe. Unlike refugees and asylum seekers, notes Legrain, “There isn’t much consciousness, and certainly no active lobbying,” for friendlier immigration rules. For now, he adds, it’s “Romeo and Juliet against the backdrop of a bureaucracy.”
Still, there have been some improvements. In Canada, at least, the processing time for permanent residence applications for spouses is now generally a year or under, considerably shorter than in the past, even for countries with high rates of marriage fraud, such as India and China, where it could easily take up to three years. Although, with some countries in Africa and the Middle East, applicants face over a two-year wait, on average.
Brent and Gemma say they’ll worry about their love being grouped in with the sham unions—until Gemma gets a positive response from CIC. “We’re going to have a big party when I get my residency,” she says. If something goes wrong, the first step would be to appeal in Canada. “Then, I think I would have to return to England and apply again or Brent and I would have to consider moving to England altogether.” She adds: “I just really, really hope that we don’t have to face that problem.” Brent muses, “We had a bit of a fairy-tale meeting, but all that gets kind of smashed when you hear the other half of our story, about how hard it was to actually make the fairy tale work, to get to a happy ending. This isn’t Disney.”
