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| Pixabay image: Snapito Studio |
Woe is us if a “marriage of convenience” ever started to define other important matters in a person’s life beyond whether you get to become a Canadian.
Immigration is a hot issue these days, as it’s mostly been since the birth of Canada. But this week’s story about an Afghan woman rejected for permanent residency after Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada deemed her eight-year marriage to be a front to help her get citizenship – well, that’s just a whole other fascinating issue to get thinking about.
What exactly IS the definition of a loving marriage that
government turns to in making decisions like this? What signs and tells in our
daily relationships might be quietly signalling to government eyes whether
there’s love or just mutual benefit underpinning our marriages?
I have heard stories of marriages of convenience, of course,
and of the level of subterfuge necessary when the people involved still expect
to have completely independent lives apart from each other but need to pretend
like they’re a couple.
That’s not the situation in this case, however. We're left to speculate what IRCC saw that didn’t look loving enough when it
scrutinized this Ontario couple, but they have been together for eight years and
have a seven-year-old child.
Ontario immigration lawyer Binod Rajgandha told the CBC
that IRCC considers factors like big age gaps or a “minimal knowledge of the
partner’s life” when deciding if a marriage is real or merely convenient.
If IRCC learned while interviewing the couple “that they
hardly know each other's background, such as the personal history, the interest
or the family details," that could be ruled as a marriage of convenience,
says Rajgandha.
Well, then. That certainly disqualifies quite a number of
marriages I’m familiar with – lifelong unions where the bride wore white, the
groom gave a moving toast to his beloved, and love was in the air. I guess I’d
best start working harder at prying personal details out of my partner, just in
case somebody shows up at the door one day with notification that we’re being
investigated for having the wrong kind of marriage.
No doubt we're all familiar with marriages whose outward appearances
suggest they’re likely of the “mutual benefit” kind rather than romantic love. Beautiful
young wives of toadish, aging rich men come to mind.
He prizes beauty and she prizes creature comforts. Judge if you will. But who can say if that’s less of a marriage than the one that starts with an exchange of electrified gazes across a crowded room?
I’ve made the acquaintance of couples in arranged
marriages, and I can’t tell the difference between what they’ve got and what my
other married friends have.
Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure all my grandparents had
marriages of convenience, as did all the generations before them where women’s
rights were so restricted that they had no choice but to put maximum value on a
man with a job and a good future.
Is that love in the eyes of my Romanian grandmother in her
wedding photo as she marries my Chinese grandfather, 10 years older than her
and stranded in Moose Jaw without hope of a Chinese wife because of Canadian immigration
laws at that time? I don’t think so. With her parents soon off to Alberta and
looking to shed daughters, hers was a marriage of convenience if ever there was
one.
Was it less of a marriage because of that? My grandparents had
nine children, and their children’s children had children, and on it has gone
through more than 100 years of good Canadians coming out of that long-ago
arrangement. Whatever fuels the wishes of two people to say “I do,” we can only imagine
the weird thinking that government must be doing in trying to draw the line
between love and convenience.
I get that these are our laws. If you marry a Canadian, you
have a better chance of becoming Canadian yourself. Obviously a law like that
is motivation for immigrants wanting to stay in the country.
But who’s to say that motive is any less worthy as the
foundation for an authentic marriage than any of the other motives that drive
us in the hunt for a lifetime partner – security,
escape, regular sex, a better household income, two parents to share childcare,
someone to eat dinner with, a travel companion?
If we’re genuinely fearful that Canada is awash in phony
marriages because this law is being used as a loophole for immigration, then we
can talk about that. Important to keep in mind that this
2017 report says “marriages of convenience” in Canada account for just six
per cent of all rejected permanent-resident applications, so it’d be a lot of
fuss for almost no gain.
But if immigrants are being judged for entry based on some
checklist government has for deciphering whether a marriage is real, I think we’ll
want to start there. Tell me, Minister Marc Miller – what is love? I’m pretty
sure a federal bureaucracy has no idea.
