 Welcome to our channel. Today I'm doing a video on misrepresentation. This is a topic that's very complicated and it's very sad too because if there is misrepresentation in a file, this can sometimes mean that the person is excluded from sponsoring a child or a spouse to Canada. There are different types of misrepresentation, which can also lead, for example, if you misrepresented, which means that you lied in a visitor visa application, you can be refused from entering Canada, you can have a bar to Canada for multiple years, or it could be very difficult for you to be able to get approvals in the future. I'm not going to talk about that type of misrepresentation. The type of misrepresentation that we're going to focus on this video is about exclusion. This happens when, for example, someone immigrates to Canada under the express entry category, for example, and fails to disclose that he has two dependent children in the application. This means that in the forms he does not indicate, it says, do you have any children? He doesn't indicate that he has children. There's no documentation about the children, birth certificates or anything like that, and there's no mention as to why he's not mentioning them. What happens in the future is once he's a permanent resident, a couple of years later, his children are still under, have the age requirement to be sponsored to Canada under a child sponsorship application. This person decides to now sponsor his children to Canada, but immigration finds out through the history of the file that in this person's permanent resident application, he had not disclosed his children. This means that his children are not a member of the family class because they were not disclosed in the initial application. Another example, which is very common, is a woman immigrates to Canada in a skilled worker or applies for a clear and express entry. Various application becomes a permanent resident and fails to indicate that she has a husband. She's been married to a husband for many years or it could also be a common law partner, fails to disclose. It could be for different reasons. It could be that it's a mistake, she incorrectly filled out the forms. It could be that some people think that because you are in a common law relationship, which means that you have been living continuously with your partner for at least 12 months in Canada or outside Canada, this is not a spouse. So in the forms, for example, in this case, she doesn't indicate that. Or it could be that some, I get a lot of consultations where people say, well, I thought that if I included my husband, it would take much longer for my application. So I didn't think it was a big deal. I didn't put him and I just thought I would sponsor him later. Or we see this a lot is someone applies to become a permanent resident. Their file is in process for a year. They get a letter saying that their application is approved and they're soon going to get a confirmation of permanent resident in that one or two month period. They decide, well, they do get married and they fail to update immigration with their marital status. Or when they come to get landed at the border in Canada, or within Canada, they, on the confirmation of permanent residence and in discussion with the officer, there's always information about how you need to update any information about your marital status. They fail to disclose that they've been married. And now a couple of months later, they're like, oh, I'm a permanent resident, now I'm going to sponsor my wife, my husband. And the wife or the husband is excluded because you failed to disclose this before you became a permanent resident. So unfortunately, what we see is a lot of, sometimes people fail to disclose for deliberate reasons. Sometimes they want to hide certain things. For example, they have a dependent child that has a disability. They have a husband or a common law partner that has a criminal history which might make the sponsor or the applicant for their permanent resident application inadmissible. And these cases are very kind of black and white in the sense that obviously you did this because you wanted to gain a benefit under the act. And you did this intentionally so you cannot sponsor anymore. But the cases that I see very often are cases where people just made an honest mistake for different, very complicated, very personalized reasons. For example, we see a lot of cases where same sex couples in certain countries where it's forbidden to be in that relationship, one of them immigrates to Canada. But because of fear of discovery of the relationship and other reasons, they do not disclose the partner. And this is done out of fear and it's also done out of, well, I don't really understand that in Canada this is allowed. And here I'm not supposed to disclose it. I can't be public with this information so I'm not going to disclose this. But then when they come to Canada and they understand the rules and they see that in Canada this is something that's allowed, they decide, well, I'm going to sponsor my partner now of 15 years. And then they get this refusal letter that says, well, you misrepresented, you didn't disclose that you were in this relationship for so many years. So these are, those types of cases are very, very difficult and I get very heartbroken a lot of times when I hear them because sometimes it's really honest mistakes where people that didn't know, didn't get legal advice, didn't understand, or they got legal advice from certain people in their community or certain agencies or certain representatives that told them, you know what, don't disclose, you do this and then you'll figure it out. It's unfortunate because it literally ruins lives and it could separate family members, loved ones from each other for a very long time, if not forever. It's a little bit cruel as a law I find because there are some people that are not doing it intentionally, they're just very confused and they don't know when their circumstances in their life that made it, that they made this unfortunate mistake. Now what to do when this happens, there are solutions, it's not always possible. So it's important, I would say, for this type of case to really consult with a lawyer, not every immigration application needs to be, you don't need to always have a lawyer. But for this type of complicated case, I think it's necessary to consult with a lawyer who's going to be able to look at all the details of the file in your case and look at the case law and look at the history and tell you, you know what, let's try this humanitarian approach. Let's try this temporary resident permitted TRP or let's contest this in the federal court at a judicial review. But it depends, not every, even though sometimes it's very, very difficult, even if we do the agency, even if we do the TRP or the federal court, it might not work. But in some very specific cases, if you get proper legal advice and your representative, your lawyer is able to properly prepare the application, there are some chances that it could be approved. There is the exception in the act with respect to humanitarian and compassionate factors where an officer when reviewing all of the details of the case has discretion to determine, okay, you are excluded, but there are enough factors to let you in. We've done many of those cases and we've been not always successful, but in the cases that we usually take on, most of the time we are successful because we carefully select those cases and we make sure we explain to the clients that this is going to be a difficult case, it might not work, but if you want to try everything and you want to make sure you at least try to get your partner or your child here, we can do this this way, we can work together as a team to provide very, very strong documentation. So if we do prepare those types of applications, we give you a very detailed list of documents to support your application. So we want to write strong submission letters, we want to explain every detail that led to the exclusion, we want to ask you to give a lot of reference letters from friends and family, people in your community that know the history and can attest to the fact as to why you decided to not mention your partner or your child. So we can file an application under humanitarian grounds, we can always request to try to request a temporary resident permit to allow the person to come in temporarily until all of this is sorted. And if that application is refused, if it's a strong good application, sometimes what we do is we follow, if it's refused, we follow judicial review at the federal court, because sometimes that's the only way for us to win an approval is if we go to federal court. And if we build a strong file for the federal court, sometimes we even get a consent before going in front of a judge. So that could be quite fast. And if we do get a consent, or if we do get the judicial review allowed, what happens is that the file that we initially submitted under humanitarian grounds goes back to the embassy or the high consulate for a redetermination by a different officer. So a different officer will now look at the file and make a decision based on the federal court decision. This does not mean that the decision will be positive 100%. I would say most of the time it's approved. I would say a good 95, 98% of the time, all the cases I've done for a redetermination have always been approved when we're at that stage. But an officer can find other reasons or same reasons but worded differently to refuse again, hopefully not, but that is a possibility. So we would then go for redetermination, the officer would ask for updated documentation and usually we're able to get the process moving kind of fast in order to to have the application approved so that your family member can become a permanent resident of Canada. If you have any questions about this, if you feel you're in a situation, a similar situation where you feel somebody told you that this is not possible, but you feel that your mistake was an honest mistake and you feel you might have some humanitarian compassionate grounds, do send us an email at info at keyorgimmigrationlaw.com and we'll set up a time to speak with you to see if we can help you out. Thank you.