CANADIAN CITIZENS SHOULD HAVE THE ABSOLUTE RIGHT TO INVITE ANYONE ON TOURIST/VISITOR VISA

–By Partap Dua

It is strange that despite spending over 25 years in Canada, many of us cannot get our relatives and friends to visit us in Canada. I believe it should be unequivocal right of any citizen or PR to be able to invite anyone from anywhere on the planet. The Visa officers should have no say over invite visas.

One should not have to be rich to visit Canada. And one should not have to be rich to invite friends and relatives to visit Canada. More than 80% Canadians live on credit cards and we have no right to boast about our superiority over other humans living on same planet.

The government, especially the Liberals, have made the tourist visa like a life wish and many Canadians are kept engaged in preparing heaps of unnecessary documents to invite their brothers, sisters, parents and childhood friends on a simple visit to Canada. Now the visa officers  have started asking for 3 years tax returns, job letters and employment letters, not only from Canadian sponsors of visit but also from the applicants of tourist visas. The application process has been made unnecessarily complex and time consuming. I have lived over 25 years in Canada and am very well settled and yet I could not invite my father, mother, brother, sister, uncle or any of my friends to Canada. If I can be refused I can well imagine, what would be happening to people who are struggling in low paying jobs and do not own properties. Most applicants and sponsors are forced to forge documents just for tourist visas in order to comply the complex requirements of Canadian tourist visa despite the invitation letter.

What right the Government has to refuse you to invite a guest in to your own house in Canada? That should be your discretion. If you are able to afford the visit, who is visa officer to decide that you cannot? Two thirds of Canadian population are not affluent at all and struggle to survive. And we ask visitors to prove that they are rich and wealthy???

These visa requirements mostly affect the Canadian citizens and PRs from developing countries, because most relatives of Caucasian citizens do not need visa to enter Canada except from some poor countries.

Despite harping on the fact that visitors will not go back, the government should strengthen the laws on exit rules. The rules should be such that all visitors are forced to go back.

A simple invitation letter should grant the visa to a visiting relative or friend in under one week.

Visa officers discriminate and have been given unnecessary draconian powers to refuse visit visas to the most genuine, and clever people who manage to forge documents are granted visas. Personally in my family, not a single person wanted to visit Canada, including my father and other family members. It was me who was forcing them to visit my family as we could not afford to get time to visit them. In the end I could not have a single visa approved despite the fact, neither me nor my wife had any immediate relative in Canada. We had owned a house for years and had high income.

Sadly, the immigration minister, Ahmed Hussen, is himself a refugee immigrant from Somalia and there are around 30 ethnic MPs. But as I said, the Liberal party is comprised of ‘yes men’ and ‘yes women’, and individual MPs have no minds or moral courage of their own. Have you ever seen these MPs indulging in anything to improve lives of fellow Canadians? I haven’t.

Our party intends to amend the immigration rules.