Ottawa loses immigration paperwork for Quebecer’s Cuban family

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OTTAWA – A Quebec man spent over $10,000 on a sponsorship application filed last year to bring his Cuban wife and her son to Canada only to be told by the immigration department last week that it lost the file and he must reapply.

“My wife isn’t a dirty rag, she’s a human like the person who reads her application, like the person who verifies it,” a discouraged Yves Charbonneau told National Post during an interview.

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“I did everything I needed to do to make sure the application was complete,” he added. “I’m not asking for charity from the government. All I asked for was for the permission to bring my wife here so we can live as a family, to get her (and her son) out of the misery over there.”

Charbonneau, a 65-year-old who works in the construction industry, says it was love at first sight when he met his future wife Elbis Vega Suarez, 50, who worked at the Cuban hotel he was vacationing at in January 2020.

One year later, Suarez and Charbonneau got married under the Cuban sun and he got to work preparing a family reunification immigration application for her and her 13-year-old son when he got back to Canada.

He says preparing the application cost him over $10,000 because of travel to and from Cuba to collect the necessary documents from his family and local authorities as well as lawyer fees. That’s on top of a $50,000 house he purchased and renovated in Cuba to house his wife and stepson as well as himself during his frequent visits.

After working on the application for over a year, Charbonneau and his lawyer, veteran immigration expert Stéphane Handfield, filed the application for Suarez and her son to come to Canada via federal government’s online portal in February 2023.

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That’s when Charbonneau’s Kafkaesque saga with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) began.

Documents provided by Handfield and an interview with his lawyer show that four months later, IRCC requested that Charbonneau send his entire application by mail to its Sydney, N.S., office because the department wanted to see the original signature on some documents.

“Ever since IRCC created the online application portal, I submit requests via the portal. Asking us to submit a paper application is exceptional and isn’t the norm. I didn’t quite understand why they asked us to resubmit it,” Handfield said.

In November 2023, Charbonneau sent a paper version of the application to Nova Scotia containing troves of sensitive personal information, including copies of his family’s passports, birth certificates, tax filings and his social insurance number. Canada Post tracking data shows the package was sent to IRCC’s office on Nov. 13 and delivered seven days later.

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Then Charbonneau and Handfield waited for months for news. But it was only when Bloc Québécois MP Christine Normandin’s office inquired about the application at Charbonneau’s request that they discovered IRCC had apparently lost the file.

Fifteen months after Charbonneau first submitted the immigration application via IRCC’s online portal, the department asked him to resubmit it the same way.

“It appears that we cannot locate the file submitted on 2023/11/13. The department requests that the documentation be resubmitted,” reads an update by IRCC to Normandin’s office last week.

“Please note that the original date of receipt … will be honoured during the processing of the request. At this stage, please advise your client to send the new request via the online portal,” it continues.

IRCC declined to comment on Charbonneau’s case, citing privacy limitations despite Charbonneau and Handfield providing written consent for the department to discuss the file with National Post. IRCC insisted that Suarez also needed to sign a consent form, which her lawyer said was virtually impossible as her access to Internet in Cuba is extremely limited.

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In an interview, Normandin said that IRCC’s screw-up in Charbonneau and Suarez’s file doesn’t surprise her.

“This isn’t the first time I see this,” Normandin, who is a lawyer who previously dealt with immigration cases, said. “This shows the extent to which the loss of paper files is symptomatic at IRCC. It’s a classic.”

Charbonneau and Handfield say they’re also extremely concerned about who has the paper file he submitted that is chock full of sensitive personal data.

“These documents have to be somewhere, and they’re obviously not at IRCC’s offices because they can’t find them. So where are they? The file contained copies of passports, pictures, notices of assessment, driving licenses, birth certificates,” Handfield said.

“That’s more than what’s necessary to steal someone’s identity.”

National Post

Cnardi@postmedia.com

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