Immigration, refugees and citizenship Canada (IRCC) has come out with a new application package that clarifies the application process for sponsoring a common-law partner or spouse.

Thousands of families and couples have been reunited through the Spousal and common-law partner sponsorship immigration program from Canada. This program is one of the salient features of the immigration system of Canada.

However, this immigration program has been surrounded with some problems and prominent among them is ‘marriage of convenience’.

In the immigration terminology, a marriage of convenience is a relationship that has been established only for the purpose of obtaining immigration. People who are entering this relation have no intention of continuing it for long.

A number of tools are used by visa officers to find out if a marriage is a fraud, and it includes interviews, document checklists and home visits. A new application package has recently been released by IRCC to make their evaluation process more thorough and deep.

This new rule came into rule in December 2016 for the first time and it evaluates the documents submitted by the applicants.

Here are Some Important Numbers

As per the latest data released by IRCC, a total of 2,288 applications for spousal sponsorship were turned down in 2015 as visa granting officer had suspicion that they are marriage of convenience.

This number comprises of the 6.1% applications for permanent residency that were turned down in the same year. In the period between 2013 and 2015, more than 110,000 permanent residency applications were turned down and in this 5.1% were of spousal sponsorship category.

The latest figures clearly shows that the majority of applications submitted for sponsorship of spouse or partner are found to be genuine. According to IRCC a total of 86% application were approved in June 2016 that were submitted under the common-law partner or spousal category or for dependent children.

When a genuine relation is taken into consideration, spousal or common-law partner sponsorship applications can be refused on two grounds. The visa officer may find that two individuals have entered a relation for the purpose of immigration. Applications are also denied when it is found that a person broke up a genuine relation and entered into another relation.