As a Canadian permanent resident or Canadian citizen looking to sponsor your foreign national spouse to acquire Canadian permanent residence, you have to ensure that at the time their application is being processed, your marriage to your spouse is genuine. This means that the immigration officers must not find that your marriage is a marriage of convenience, commonly known as an immigration marriage.
Five Ways To Avoid Marriages Of Convenience
There are ways that can help you reduce the likelihood of your marriage being found to be a marriage of convenience.
Evidence Of Financial Support
First, it is important to ensure that where there has been financial support between yourself and your spouse, you provide sufficient documentation that shows that this financial support exists. For instance, if you had a joint bank account, you need to include bank statements of fund remittances from the account in your application to show that you have been providing financial support over time.
You can also include receipts of the bank remittance payments to your spouse to show that there has been financial support. Similarly, if there is any other kind of financial arrangement between you and your spouse such as an insurance policy, you can include a copy of the document to support the application.
Evidence Of Communication
Secondly, it is crucial for you to ensure that whatever communication you have had between you and your spouse is included as much as possible in the application. The importance of including evidence of communication is to show that you have been in a relationship with your spouse over a sustained period of time and that the relationship is genuine.
Therefore, even where your marriage happens to be fairly recent, you should provide evidence showing a history of having been in a relationship with your spouse. Such evidence can be in the form of printed WhatsApp Messaging, text messaging, written letters or emails depending on your modes of communication. This evidence would help in showing that your marriage is genuine.
Evidence Of Living Together
Importantly, if you and your spouse were living together previously, you need to provide evidence to support that fact. Evidence proving that you have lived together may be in the form of a copy of your lease agreement if you leased a property together. It could be a copy of property ownership documents if you jointly own property.
In case you neither own property jointly or leased a property together you can use utility bills that have both your names on them. These kinds of documents will show that you have lived together, and this may be beneficial in proving that your marriage is genuine.
Evidence Of Relationship
Additionally, you need to show that your relationship with your spouse developed over time. An ideal way of proving this fact is by providing copies of travel itinerary if any. If you have traveled together to different destinations in the past, copies of your airline tickets, pictures together during travel among other travel itinerary documents can help to substantiate your claim that your marriage is genuine and that your relationship developed over time.
Evidence Of Knowledge Of Your Spouse
Finally, you need to ensure that you have brushed up on your knowledge of each other. The fact that you are in a relationship and you are married, there is an assumption that you both know a lot of intimate details about each other. At the point when your spouse’s residence application is being processed, the Canadian immigration authorities are likely to do an interview with you and your spouse.
The interview is done separately to determine whether your responses are consistent. This helps the immigration authorities to ascertain whether your understanding and knowledge about each other correlates with the information both of you shared during the interview. Therefore, you ought to ensure that you are adequately knowledgeable about each other and prepared to undergo an interview to confirm the genuineness of your marriage.
Let Us Help
If you are a Canadian permanent resident or a Canadian citizen and you wish to sponsor your spouse in their Canadian permanent residency application, we are here to assist you and your spouse put together the required documentation and guide you throughout the process.
We are here to provide professional advice on the best ways to avoid your marriage being rendered an immigration marriage or a marriage of convenience by the Canadian immigration authorities.
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