Federal government investigating how it lost immigration application

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OTTAWA – The federal Immigration Department says it is investigating how it managed to lose track of the sponsorship application file of a Quebec man trying to bring his Cuban wife and her son to Canada.

“IRCC continues to investigate what occurred in Ms. Suarez’s case,” Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) spokesperson Loic Ouellette said in an emailed statement.

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Friday, National Post revealed the Kafkaesque saga of Yves Charbonneau’s efforts to bring his Cuban wife Elbis Vega Suarez and her 13-year-old son to Canada.

In February 2023, Charbonneau applied via IRCC’s online portal to have his wife of two years immigrate to Canada using the Family Reunification Program.

After the department asked him months later to refile his application by mail to its Sydney, N.S., office, Charbonneau and his lawyer Stéphane Handfield sent in the documents — including pictures of his passport, driver’s licence, birth certificate and income tax declaration — in November 2023.

Canada Post tracking records show the package was delivered to IRCC’s offices on Nov. 20, 2023.

That appears to be their last known location. Last week, 15 months after Charbonneau first filed the immigration request for his wife and her son online, IRCC informed him that it could not locate the file and advised him to refile the application via the web portal.

“We pay, we pay, we pay, then we wait, we wait, we wait, then they lose the file,” a discouraged Charbonneau told National Post.

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He says he spent over $10,000 in travel to Cuba, paperwork and legal fees to submit the application for his wife and stepson.

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.

Ouellette said the department does not compile statistics on how many files the department misplaces yearly.

He said that the department has undertaken significant efforts to digitize the application intake process to increase processing capacity and efficiency but did not explain why Charbonneau was asked to refile his digital application by paper.

“Having a digital record of applications allows for easier tracking of each stage of application processing, and facilitates work sharing without the need to mail paper documents between locations,” he wrote.

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Charbonneau’s MP, the Bloc Québécois’ Christine Normandin, told National Post that she frequently has to help constituents whose immigration documents have been misplaced or lost by IRCC.

“For every file that we know is lost like Mr. Charbonneau’s, how many others are there that we don’t know have been lost?” she said.

“When I practised immigration law, we heard stories about Canada’s visa office in Dakar (Senegal). When they were moving the office, someone pulled a filing drawer and found a bunch of files that had fallen behind the drawer and were lost for 10 years. But no one knew they’d been lost, and they were never processed. Unfortunately, this sort of thing happens regularly,” Normandin said.

National Post

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