Let us help you tell your love story to Canada
By Kamaljit Lehal
Our firm has been successfully assisting clients, for over 30 years, with their spousal sponsorship applications (both inland and overseas applications). These applications are a joy to complete and it gives us immense satisfaction when a couple receives that positive decision allowing them to make their lives together in Canada. We take pride in helping these clients tell their love story to Canada.
From Canada Immigration’s perspective the key focus in assessing these applications is the genuineness of the marriage. This requires explaining how the couple met, how their relationship evolved to one of permanently committing to each other. This is the love story that we help our clients tell Canada Immigration.
We have represented clients who have experienced a fairy tale love story, instant chemistry and attraction followed by time spent together on dates and trips culminating in the dramatic ‘down on one knee’ marriage proposal, or couples who have fallen in love and lived together for a number of years in a marriage-like relationship. These couples fit nicely into the western paradigm of what love and marriage should look like.
We have also represented clients whose love for each other grew after a traditional arranged marriage introduction. These couples met, briefly, through families and shortly thereafter, sometimes within days, they were married. The arranged marriages are antagonistic to the western – “modern” way of entering a relationship.
Regardless, whether the couple’s relationship fits the western mould or the more traditional mould, at Lehal Law we have helped clients, successfully, tell their love story. This process takes time and patience, taking a stroll with the couple down memory lane and piecing together everything in a way that the essence of their love story is truly captured. The traditional marriages take more time to elicit from the couple details about what it was about each other that made them agree to the proposed match and get married. Despite the brevity of their time spent together before their marriage, which may have been just one meeting over coffee, these clients are still able to share small details that tell us their story in a big way.
Even the more challenging cases where Canada Immigration may view as a mismatch, such as someone marrying a divorced person, or a divorced person with children, or someone much older or younger, or from a different culture, we have helped these clients tell their love story. These “mismatches” are viewed as red flags by Immigration and their genuineness is carefully scrutinized. However, as the saying goes, “love is blind” — it is an emotional connection between two people based on more than what appears on the surface to others. We help clients share those emotions in a compelling way so as to eliminate any concerns about their love for each other. Being culturally sensitive, we are able to provide a safe place for our clients to tell their love story.
Spousal Sponsorship Applications are more than just filling out immigration forms, it is helping our clients paint a picture of their love story. Whether that client had a typical fairy tale romance or a more traditional arranged marriage or even an outward “mismatched” union, we work with our clients to bring out what they felt when they first saw each other and how their relationship evolved to a permanent commitment to each other.
We have been told that we have a flare for telling our clients’ story to Canada Immigration, but truly what we have is a real passion for wanting to unite couples by helping them tell their love story to Canada.