Hang on - is that a convenient marriage you've got there?

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.

The icky truth about international students in Canada

Opportunistic Canadian training institutes that over-promise and under-deliver are no doubt a problem for international students in Canada. The BC government's pledge this week to get to the bottom of that could be helpful.

But if we're thinking it's just Bob's Shady Career College for Suckers that's the problem, take a look at the tuition fees that mainstream universities are charging for international students. 

It helps explain why so many people seem to be freaking out at a shift in the political winds around international students.

It's not because anyone's got a big heart for shielding international students from a shoddy education, or keeping more spaces open for Canadian students. It's about post-secondaries and employers that have been dining out on foreign students for many years, and can't bear to give that up.

The Tyee had a great read on that earlier this month, appropriately headlined "Cash Cows and Cheap Labour." 

Not only do post-secondaries bring in far more money from foreign students than domestic students, the high cost of living in Canada ensures that those students will have to look for work while studying here. That's great news for employers looking to fill low-end jobs. 

Langara College Prof. Jenny Francis told the Tyee that after studying the issues for foreign students in Canada, she'd concluded that they are "the new temporary foreign worker, basically."

And while the provincial and federal governments seem to want to point the finger for exploitive tuition fees at "the diploma equivalent of puppy mills," they'd be wise to take a look at what the higher-status universities are up to as well.  

Let's start with the University of BC, where the cost of completing an undergraduate program is typically more than eight times higher for an international student than a domestic one. The Medical Laboratory Science program, for instance, costs $7,500 for a Canadian student, while a foreign student will shell out $61,000. 

Need an applied science degree in engineering? That'll be $15,000 if you're Canadian, and $60,000 if you're not. Same with a commerce degree. 

Not surprisingly, the number of international students at UBC climbed from 8,685 in the 2012-13 fiscal year to 17,040 in 2021-22. If one international student pays as much tuition as eight Canadians, who can say no?

At the University of Victoria, the per-credit cost is five times higher for international students than for domestic students - $1,981 compared to $411. At any point where there's an additional fee, international students pay much more for that as well: $990 to challenge a course as compared to $205; $1,500 to challenge a co-op work term versus $776. 

Even the mandatory acceptance fee that has to be paid just to get started at UVic is three times higher for foreign students, coming in at $750.

Clearly, the primary responsibility for figuring out whether you can afford to study in Canada has to reside with the foreign student. It's up to them to do their research and make sure they're not signing up with Bob's Shady Career College. It's up to them to bring a healthy level of distrust for any recruiter who makes it sound like studying in Canada is a ticket to permanent residency. (In BC, less than a third of foreign undergraduates land permanent residency within five years of graduating.)

But if foreign students feel like they're doing their best on all of that yet still feeling like there's some plot afoot to take advantage of them, they're right. 

Canada planned things to go exactly the way they're going. The use of foreign students as cash cows and cheap labour was all carefully laid out in the 2013 federal report, "International Education: A Key Driver of Canada's Future Prosperity." 

"We must recognize the immediate benefits of international education for Canada, which span economic growth, job creation, and increased exports and investment," noted the report. "These benefits are distributed across all of Canada, from coast to coast to coast."

And wow, did post-secondaries embrace the challenge. There were 239,000 international students in Canada at the time of that report, with a goal to double that by 2023. Instead, the number of students had quadrupled to a million by last year.

The Tyee notes a 2019 report to the BC government that highlighted the $3.5 billion in tuition fees that international students were bringing in that year. If they were an export commodity, said the report, they would be the third most valuable in the province, after fuel and timber.

Apparently a number of educators interviewed for the Tyee's story felt uncomfortable with that comparison. But that was exactly what our governments set out to do with the massive expansion in international students: Create cash cows and a new pool of cheap labour. 

I haven't seen anyone try to put an international-development-and-global-goodwill spin on any of this, and at least that's a relief. The only foreign students who could possibly afford these tuition fees come from wealthy families. Nobody's even pretending this is about supporting citizens from challenged countries toward a better future for themselves and their homeland. 

But trying to present this issue as being about "a few bad apples" is just plain wrong. We've been taking advantage of foreign students for at least a decade, and now we're a little embarrassed that we let it go this far. Just say it. 

Sex Work Alliance guide to effective consultations with Ottawa

    The Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform has just put out an excellent guide for sex workers and allies looking to be more effective in driving legislative change. It's well-written, thorough and well-organized, and while it's focus is decriminalization, the information in the guide would be useful for prompting a change in thinking around any number of issues under federal jurisdiction. It's really a how-to for the engaged citizen.
    This is a big year for sex work law reform in Canada, what with the three key laws around adult, consensual sex work having been struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Canada in December. Those of us who support decriminalization as a step toward increasing safety, respect and dignity for adult sex workers will need to be out there pushing on this issue, because it's not a subject that rests easy with any political party.
     Download the guide here and put it to use in all your advocacy work. 

Federal government fumbles again. And again. And again...

Never mind the federal inquiry into B.C.’s vanishing sockeye salmon that will soon be underway. How about an inquiry into the federal government itself?
I’m sure the feds must be good at something. But they’re routinely quite hopeless, in ways that would almost be funny if it weren’t for the harm being done to Canadians and the country.
How have they hurt us? Let me count the ways:
H1N1 - If this had really been “the big one,” we’d have been as hooped as a New Orleans hurricane victim waiting for rescue after Katrina. As luck would have it, we’ve been allowed to test our national pandemic strategy with a virus that wasn’t as terrifying as expected, but picture the shape we’d be in right now had the new flu strain remained as lethal as it was in its early days in Mexico.
Canada has a 550-page pandemic preparedness plan, developed by the Public Health Agency four years ago after a botched national response to the SARS crisis. But the Canadian Medical Association Journal sounded the alarm in September that the plan was neither workable nor in keeping with best medical practices when it came to H1N1.
For starters, the plan around H1N1 was to have Canada’s single flu vaccine supplier produce three different flu vaccines at the same time, even though the Quebec plant has just one production line. No deep thinking required to see the problem that was bound to create.
The plant was already busy producing seasonal flu vaccine by the time the H1N1 vaccine was developed this fall. So that delayed production of the H1N1 vaccine - to the point that two waves of the flu had already swept through most Canadian communities by the time vaccinations were underway.
Then the plant had to switch course again when the government ordered 1.8 million doses of “non-adjuvenated” H1N1 vaccine for pregnant women, having grown nervous of the shark oil derivatives added to the vaccine. That delayed production of the regular H1N1 vaccine a second time.
Nor did the plan take into account human behaviour in times of crisis. The honour system breaks down quickly when people believe their lives are under threat, and who can blame them for thinking that after seven months of hysterical and confusing media coverage? There’s always a way to jump the queue if you work the angles, which is why junior hockey teams and wealthy Toronto hospital donors have ended up vaccinated while high-risk populations are still lining up.
Why did we choose a single vaccine supplier? The Chretien Liberals signed that exclusive deal back in 2001 with Quebec’s Shire BioChem, bought by GlaxoKlineSmith in 2005. Coincidentally, Shire BioChem gave a $56,000 donation to the Liberal Party that year.
The gun registry - This sad tale started in 1995 with the passing of a new Firearms Act. The plan required all gun owners to register their weapons and was sold to Canadians on the basis of it costing taxpayers just $2 million a year. Fourteen lost years and some $2 billion later, parliament voted this week to scrap the registry for all guns other than handguns.
The data on seven million registered “long guns” collected over the years will be thrown away. More than $21 million in registration fees has already been returned to Canadian long-gun owners, with more to come. Your tax dollars at work.
Employment Insurance - Remember when Canadians who were unemployed could actually get benefits to help them through a dry spell?
Back in 1990, 80 per cent of unemployed Canadians qualified for such benefits. These days, only 38 per cent do. That’s because the federal government has spent well over a decade tightening up policies, to the point that most out-of-work Canadians no longer qualify.
The denial of benefits has resulted in significant annual surpluses accruing to the federal government for more than 14 years now, even while the number of Canadians receiving benefits has plummeted by more than 56 per cent.
Fisheries - The latest concern is a Fraser River sockeye salmon return this fall that was 93 per cent smaller than what the Department of Fisheries and Oceans had forecast. The federal government has now launched an inquiry, which is what we do in Canada when we want to douse the flames on a hot issue.
But that’s just the latest addition to a long list of alarming examples of fisheries mismanagement in B.C. Federal government policies have decimated fish stocks, sandbagged monitoring and enhancement, and wiped out a thriving community-based industry in order to give the resource away to a handful of wealthy men. It’s unforgiveable.
I could go on. The sponsorship scandal. The e-health scandal. The isotope fiasco. The fumbling bird flu response. The deeply flawed immigration system.
George Bernard Shaw once described democracy as “a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.” Frightening to think what that says about us.

Are we sure we're still on the way up?

I suppose every generation wants to believe it’s improving on the past. That’s how it always seemed in my history lessons at school, too - that we were intent on working our way up, from “primitive” to medieval to Renaissance and right on through to the enlightened human beings of modern times.
We’ve made some remarkable progress. We’re healthier than we’ve ever been, and easily surviving diseases that once used to kill us off in vast numbers. We don’t just talk about human rights, we enshrine them in our laws. We wear our seatbelts, bicycle helmets, sunscreen and in-car sobriety with pride, and are better for it.
I used to ponder ugly moments in history and feel grateful for not having been alive in those years. The destructive and stupid behaviours of human beings through the ages baffled me, but I was happy that my generation dwelt in kinder, gentler times and was in turn leaving a better world for their own children.
But is that what’s actually happening? Is life in Canada improving? I’ve got my doubts, given the wear and tear of two decades of federal and provincial governments whose actions have seriously eroded the social fabric of the Canada I was born into.
I don’t mean to suggest another Crusades is imminent, or that we’ll soon be using wild animals to kill off the old and weak in front of a cheering crowd of thousands.
But the disasters of history start out small - one thing and then another, each piling on top of each other to bend a country in a way that no one had expected. The emergence of a growing underclass in Canada is of no small concern.
The decline most evident to me after most of a lifetime in B.C. is a loss of economic and political power for the “common people,” if you will. It’s a subtle change that has come about incrementally, aggravated by a prevailing political ideology in which minimal government is the stated goal even while power and money accumulate at the top in ways that are very nearly feudal.
An interesting statistic, courtesy of child advocacy group First Call and Stats Canada: Between 1989 and 2006, the richest 10 per cent of B.C. families with children saw their average annual income rise 30 per cent, to $201,490. In that same period, the poorest 10 per cent of families saw their income fall eight per cent, to $15,657.
The richest of the rich in Canada more than doubled their average yearly income in the years between 1982 and 2004, to $2.5 million. The years weren’t as kind to families in the bottom 10 per cent, who by 2004 had average income of a mere $6,000 a year.
That’s not to say rich people aren’t entitled to their wealth. No doubt many work very hard for the money. But the growing gap between the rich and poor in Canada didn’t come about because the rich work hard and the poor are lazy. We’ve had a series of governments whose policies have made things better for those who already had it pretty good, and considerably worse for those just getting by.
In B.C., one of the first things to go was the fishing industry, given away by Ottawa to a handful of wealthy men. Next was forestry, to the point that even the land where the trees once grew now gets handed off to developers without a whisper of consultation.
Our social systems have become twisted versions of themselves, to the point where our governments reward themselves for taking away people’s benefits.
In the first year of B.C.’s intensified crackdown on welfare under the Liberals, a deputy minister received a $15,400 bonus for slashing the welfare caseload by 22 per cent. Eight years on, there’s little evidence that anything about the immensely costly welfare-to-work years have benefited British Columbians (see http://thetyee.ca/News/2009/04/27/Poverty/). A massive increase in homelessness in the same period has in fact increased the cost and extent of poverty dramatically.
Meanwhile, employment insurance is now so difficult to get that barely 30 to 40 per cent of unemployed Canadians qualify for it, even while Ottawa sits on a $54-billion EI surplus. If you feel frustratingly powerless to change such things, as I do, that’s a pretty serious signal that we’ve lost control of our governments.
In less than two weeks, a new government will be elected in B.C. For the sake of a better tomorrow, please pick with care and thoughtfulness. And vote “yes” for STV, which at least puts a little power back into the hands of the people.

Nothing equal about treatment of men, women in 2009 federal budget

In theory, we’re all equals in Canada. But just follow the money in the 2009 federal budget for proof of the flaws in that argument, notes an Ontario academic.
Equality looks great on paper, which is why Canada has a Charter of Rights, wide-reaching human rights law, and its signature on just about every feel-good global declaration of oneness that’s out there. We’ve been particularly passionate in our calls for equality between men and women.
But there are the warm and fuzzy things that we tell each other, and then there’s reality. A gender analysis out of Queen’s University of the most recent federal budget is a sobering reminder of just how far Canadian women continue to lag behind men economically.
The analysis was done by Prof. Kathleen Lahey, a law professor with a speciality in tax. Twenty years ago when she took her first look at whether tax laws affect men and women differently, she was stunned to discover that women were routinely “overtaxed and underbenefited.” Virtually every tax analysis she’s done since then has reaffirmed that for her.
Canada’s 2009 budget demonstrates the problem. With its emphasis on tax cuts and rate improvements for those at the higher end of the income scale, its “stimulus” measures bypass 40 per cent of Canadian women, says Lahey. They simply don’t earn enough to benefit.
Women will also miss out on much of the new money for infrastructure projects earmarked to help Canadians weather the recession, adds Lahey. The industries that will benefit primarily employ men; just seven per cent of Canada’s construction and trades workers are female. (Read Lahey’s analysis at http://www.progressive-economics.ca/2009/01/31/gender-analysis-of-budget-2009/)
Many of the issues Lahey identifies in her analysis are applicable to anyone in a lower income bracket. But women are more likely to be in that category than men, and so end up disproportionately affected.
The average income for women in Canada is just $27,000 a year, compared to $45,000 for men. The disparity is even more noticeable among single-parent families, with single moms and their children living on little more than half the income that single dads earn ($30,900 versus $58,300).
The budget made improvements to Employment Insurance benefits, but not in a way that helps women, says Lahey. Since 1996, people working less than 35 hours a week don’t qualify for benefits. That shift hit women significantly harder than men, because women do more part-time and seasonal work. The most recent enhancements improve things for those who qualify for EI - three-quarters of whom are men - but do nothing to help more people get benefits.
Flat taxes like the new carbon tax and provincial sales taxes also hit women harder, notes Lahey. A five per cent goods and services tax may sound like equal treatment for all, but such taxes in fact have a much greater impact on people with less spending power.
Why do women consistently earn less than men in Canada? We must have dissected that issue at least a thousand different ways by now, and once believed the answer was simply to push enough women through the various glass ceilings and discriminatory hiring practises getting in their way.
But the issue is more complex than that. Women are the ones who bear children, and are most likely to be the primary caregiver when children are small. We make different choices around the kind of work we do.
The jobs that women do also tend to pay less than traditional male jobs.
We could argue for years about why that’s so - and we have. But none of it has brought us closer to rectifying the situation. We may talk a good game about getting down to the business of “equal pay for work of equal value,” but the concept terrifies government and employers.
As for encouraging women to do more of the kind of work that pays well - men’s work, in other words - well, it’s good to try. We certainly need more women at the top. But all our efforts to get them there are for naught unless we can do something about the many women who crack the glass ceiling only to realize they hate everything about their new life.
Sexist tax policy can only make things worse, says Lahey. She thinks it’s time for women to “get over their dislike of tax policy” and learn enough to fight back.
“This is systemic,” Lahey says. “The direct spending and tax cuts in the federal budget simply reinforce inequalities between men and women.”