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.

Lock 'em up: Everything old is new again

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

And just like that, institutionalization is back. 

My head is in a whirl. After untold hours of my early journalism career spent documenting the hard-won battle to banish BC's bad old institutions rife with abuse and civil-liberties violations, the former executive director of the BC Civil Liberties Association is now the premier of the province and pitching involuntary care like it's a fresh new idea whose time has come. 

“This announcement is the beginning of a new phase of our response to the addiction crisis," said Premier David Eby in a statement released yesterday in which government outlined how British Columbians could now be held against their will for mental illness, drug use or brain injury if they are making their communities feel "unsafe."

"We’re going to respond to people struggling like any family member would. We are taking action to get them the care they need to keep them safe, and in doing so, keep our communities safe, too," said Eby. 

If it was possible to believe that a return to institutionalization would actually play out that way, maybe it wouldn't feel so damn sad to have us rolling the clock back 50 years. History tells us otherwise, however. The stories of suffering that journalists all heard in those years leading up to the closure of BC's big institutions were absolute heart-wrenchers.

The whole reason we abandoned institutionalization back in the 1980s is because it's a horrible idea that doesn't work, except as a means to shield "normal" people from realities they'd rather not have to think about. 

Like what happens to people with severe mental illness when they don't get help and support. Or, in this latest incarnation of "secure care" (aka imprisonment), the tremendous damage a product can have on its customers in a market totally controlled by the sellers/manufacturers and abandoned by the regulators.

Instead of trying to fix any of that, it appears we're just going to lock people up again so we don't have to see our policy failures in their shattered faces.

As researcher Gillian Kolla noted in The Tyee last week, B.C. is jumping to institutionalization without even trying to see how things might go if we actually had spaces in voluntary, trauma-informed, evidence-based treatment programs for all the people who are desperate for such services. Research and experiences all over the world - much of it right here in BC - have demonstrated time and again that institutionalization does not make people well, and in fact puts them at risk of even more harm.

Sure, temporary secure care might have a role in helping to manage some aspects of the social crisis unfolding in all of our communities. But it's meant to be a last resort, after all other attempts to help a person have failed. Please don't let anyone tell you that the people we're seeing spilling out onto our streets have had every social intervention provided to them already. That is so very far from the truth.

Our current social crises are in fact a result of decades of social needs gone unmet. We haven't even begun to try hard to help people with mental illness, substance disorders and brain injuries. Virtually all of the services we've got are patchwork, disorganized, uncoordinated, short-term and often unevaluated. BC doesn't even have an overarching social policy.

We have orchestrated a disaster with our indifference - and now we're going to "fix it" by finding new ways to hold people against their will? Not a chance. 

As Kolla also pointed out, BC does have the power right now to hold people against their will under the Mental Health Act. If someone is deemed a danger to themselves or others, they can be held. (And that definition includes threats and anti-social behaviour, as my uncle Joseph McCorkell found out back in the 1990s when he fought his own incarceration in the years before Riverview Psychiatric Hospital was fully phased out.)

How low will be the bar be for this new initiative? No details yet, but I'm going to take a wild guess that people who are impoverished, traumatized, unable to maintain paid work and with a lifetime of struggle and hardship will be the first ones in. Interesting as well that these new secure facilities are mostly going to be sited at prisons, not hospitals. 

To see brain injury thrown into the mix this time out just adds to the wrongness. Someone suffers a serious injury that causes behavioural changes that unravels a life, and our government decides the best course of action is to make it really hard for them to get any help, and then lock them up indefinitely when they inevitably fail to recover. 

As soon as I read that Vancouver story earlier this month about one person getting their hand severed by a stranger with a machete in a mental-health crisis and another person dying, I knew where this was going, especially mere weeks before a provincial election. 

Eby has been hinting at a return to institutionalization since 2022, when he was angling to replace John Horgan. BC Conservative leader John Rustad has made institutionalization part of his party's platform.  I suspect both will get plenty of support from the electorate for their positions, because everyone I know is sickened and fed up with the social disasters unfolding on their city streets. 

But the answer to the tragedies we're seeing in the hearts of our communities is not to lock people up. Where is the announcement of preventive measures to slow the flow of people onto our streets? Where are the services that would catch people early in their crisis? Why are we embracing the harshest "solution" first? 

I wonder if I will live long enough to be throwing out a bitter "I told you so" in 15 or 20 years when we are back to trying to undo the damage of this deeply sad return to institutionalization. People, we are making a mistake. 

So you think you want to be a housesitter...

https://pixabay.com/users/sinousxl-7554155/

People who have been gone from home for a while often say some version of "I can't wait to be back in my own bed" as their time away comes to an end. I haven't had my own bed since December 2011.

My partner and I have been permanent housesitters around Greater Victoria for more than eight years now, and before that, volunteers with Cuso International in Honduras and Nicaragua. We slept in the beds that came with the house rentals in Central America, and have slept in probably 60 or more beds since returning to Vancouver Island in May 2016 and taking up a life of living in other people's houses while they travel.

We had a classic black and white striped mattress with coils you could feel through the padding in our Copan Ruinas time, and then quite a decent and stiff box spring set in Managua, where you need a bed that barely dents when laid on if you're going to survive months of 38 C with nothing but a ceiling fan. 

We logged some crazy mattress hours when travelling in the countryside with our Central American work colleagues, who could sleep with ease in the damndest situations and expected us to do the same when on the road with them. The nights of six people in one small room on homemade bunk beds stand out for me.

Since returning to Victoria, we've pretty much had every variation of bed: some with super-thick mattresses, rock-hard ones, memory foam, one that was too short, adjustable ones that tilted up at head, foot and middle. Some have rolled us inward, while others sent us plummeting to the floor on a sloped edge. We generally get a decent night's sleep no matter what.

We've had a few conversations with people who would like to be permanent housesitters like us. I wouldn't say that an ability to put up with any kind of mattress is the first thing that needs to be considered, but it definitely needs some thought. Are you prepared to spend all your nights on whatever bed is in play? Are you ready to give up that late-holiday yearning for a return to your own bed?

People hearing for the first time that we are permanent housesitters - perhaps more realistically described as houseless drifters who carry their belongings around in reuseable grocery bags and mismatched totes - have one of two reactions. Either their faces light up and they immediately start thinking about how cool it might be to do the same, or they pull back in instant horror. It's as clear as that. 

If you're the type who would lean in excitedly, housesitting as a lifestyle choice has a lot of pros. 

The permanent housesitter lives virtually without household costs, enjoying a wonderfully diverse array of experiences in all kinds of different homes and locations that might otherwise be outside their affordability range. 

They aren't weighed down by stuff, mortgages or tenancy agreements. They never have to worry about managing bad neighbours; they'll never have one for longer than a few months at most. They live in the gaps of other people's lives, which really appeals to me at a philosophical level as another way to minimize my impact on this world. 

The daily reality, of course, does have some bumps that have to be considered. 

For one thing, you're almost certainly going to have a series of dogs to look after, because that's the No. 1 reason people want a housesitter in the first place, based on our experience. We love dogs, so yay to that, but they do require your full attention, especially if you want the homeowner to invite you back.

For another, you're going to live like a packhorse. Cancel out any images in your head of a footloose housesitter arriving at your latest housesit with a breezy backpack and nothing more. This is your LIFE, so you're going to arrive at every door with bags and bags of the craziest stuff. (We never let our hosts see us move in or out.) 

Anything you can't live without, you're going to be carrying around. I think you'd be surprised at just how many things you end up carrying. 

Some examples from our own experience: My keyboard and stacks of music, because I must have  piano time in my life. Our sound bar and Roku box, because you can't be sure whether a person's going to have good TV sound and a Netflix subscription. 

Baking utensils, laptops and electronics, essential spices or cooking oils, a favourite frying pan. All bathroom stuff. (I invite you to open up your bathroom cupboards right now and reflect on how many things that actually is.) My makeup and jewellry. A giant light-up 10x mirror, because who can put their makeup on without one? 

Seasonal clothing and outer wear, while remembering at least a few fancier pieces for when you go out. The perfect collection of five pairs of shoes/boots that cover all needs. Recreational equipment, like our two bikes, a folding kayak, a blow-up boat for the grandkids. Food and baking supplies, including the 20-kg bag of sugar bought impulsively during the Rogers Sugar Crisis of 2023. 

And obviously, it would not be the life for your child-rearing years. That would just be a misery all round.

The housesit that you're moving into may or may not be ready for all the stuff you'll be dragging. We've had housesits where people kindly clear out dresser drawers and space in the closet for our clothes and leave a roomy fridge, and housesits without an inch of space to spare anywhere. You won't know which one you're getting until you move in, so that old Cuso International motto of "flexible and adaptable" that got us through our four-plus years in Central America is still as useful as ever. 

How often will you be moving? So often. Curious people who think they want to give housesitting a try ask me for advice and inevitably note that they'd prefer something long-term. Just let that concept of long-term fly right out of your head if you're thinking about this life. Mostly you're going to be moving every three to four weeks. 

As I write, we're living in a Fairfield housesit that we've been in for four years, but there is a unique and quirky series of reasons for why it has lasted this long, starting with the pandemic. I'm very sure we'll never see the likes of this housesit again. And even though it's been four years, we've still had to live that whole time in complete uncertainty, having to be at least somewhat prepared to move out at any moment.

So maybe you'll be the lucky housesitter who lands the year-long gig in some perfect beachfront home, but I'd strongly counsel against even thinking that's remotely likely. If you aren't prepared to move around a lot, with much loading and unloading of your weird pile of stuff, you'll grow tired of this life very quickly.

One more thing: It's a lot of work to ensure a steady string of housesits, particularly without a Plan B. When we're in full drifter mode, I'm constantly hustling and looking. People aren't going to drop housesits in your lap, so be prepared to devote time to the hunt. 

But if you've read to this point and are still thinking that a housesitting life sounds great, let me tell you, it's got a lot going for it (and not just the absence of household costs, though that is obviously a very significant draw.) If you like staying in motion, keeping things lean, a constant change of scenery and time spent with many, many dogs and the occasional cat, it's all that and more. 

As it turns out, housesitting also lets us spend time in beautiful homes on well-gardened properties that we'd never be enjoying if it weren't for housesitting. We had a full-size pool for one long, hot August stay, and have spent many weeks in Gulf Island homes close to the water. 

We've enjoyed the most gigantic televisions. We've lounged on the nicest of decks and the comfiest of lazyboy chairs. Housesitting brings so much variety into my dog walks and cycling as well, with one new neighbourhood after another to explore.

"It is within the tension that uncertainty brings that creativity is truly born," wrote Daniella Sachs on Medium. If uncertainty and constant change is your jam, this is the life.