Marina Sedai is an immigration lawyer and the past National Chair of the Canadian Bar Association Immigration Section, a role that she served in from 2018 – 2019, and is also a past provincial char of the CBABC Immigration Law Section. She can be found on Twitter @MarinaSedai.

We discuss various myths about Canadian immigration law, including:

• Refugees get more financial help than pensioners.
• Foreign nationals immigrate and then bring their whole extended family over.
• If including your spouse or common-law partner on your permanent resident application is inconvenient or unhelpful to your immigration process then you can exclude them and later sponsor them.
• Volunteering isn’t work.
• If my kid is born in Canada then my H&C application is guaranteed to succeed.

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We discuss how mandamus applications work. Adrienne Smith is a Partner at Battista Smith Migration Law Group (update: now with https://www.smithimmigrationgroup.com/)

2:00 Does filing mandamus applications annoy Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada? 

5:30 Has there been a change in the frequency with which mandamus applications are considered? 

13:30 During COVID-19 is there a difference in filing a mandamus application between online and paper applications? 

18:00 What is a mandamus application? 

26:00 What is the legal test for a mandamus application? 

49:00 During COVID-19 when a visa office is largely close

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We discuss issues involving the deportation of long term permanent residents for criminality.

Michael Greene, Q.C. is an immigration lawyer in Calgary. He served as the National Chair of the Canadian Bar Association’s Citizenship & Immigration Section in 2000-2001. He is representing Jaskirat Singh Sidhu in his immigration and deportation matters.

5:45 – What are the grounds for deporting a permanent resident for criminality?

13:00 – How does the appeal process work?

17:00 – What are the factors in deportation.

19:00 – An overview of the history of the law involving the deportation of permanent residents.

26:00 – What is the probability of success for a permanent resident in avoiding deportation once proceedings start?

36:00 – Stays of removal

41:00 – Strategies and tips for responding to procedural fairness letters involving removal.

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Hilary Evans Cameron is an Assistant Professor at Ryerson Law. Prior to become a faculty member, Hilary represented refugee claimants for a decade. She is the author of Refugee Law’s Fact-finding Crisis: Truth, Risk, and the Wrong Mistake. Her paper on risk salience in refugee decisions that we discuss can be found here. She is also the creator of www.meetgary.ca, a website which provides guidance to both decision makers and asylum claimants on the implicit biases and thought processes that can influence decision makers. She provides training to the Immigration and Refugee Board on this topic.

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3:00 The two strong pulls in the law of how a decision maker should make a decision in a refugee hearing that impacts risk salience.

7:00 Can a decision maker ever be truly neutral?

11:00 Does the fact that the refugee process starts with a removal order “set things up” for strict scrutiny? Plus how politicians can influence error preference.

18:30 Refugee acceptance rates have increased recently. Is this a result of new decision makers or the same decision makers applying different maxims. Can someone’s risk salience approach change over time?

22:00 The non legal things that can influence decision makers.

26:30 Studies on accuracy in credibility and how risk salience follows.

30:00 Should decision makers make their biases explicit?

36:30 What is the fear that people have of refugee claimants?

43:01 The illusion of transparency. “The idea that truth will shine through.”

44:30 The myth that a memory is like a video recording.

46:00 The myth that a refugee claimant will never take unnecessary risks.

47:15 The myth of once a liar always a liar.

48:80 The maxim of the perfect applicant.

52:00 The maxim of “our expectations were clear.”

1:01 The inconsistency between standards in refugee law and trauma theory.

1:04 Hillary’s working with the IRB

1:15 Have any IRB members told Hillary that who the representative is can impact how they view the claim?

1:21 When should you admit a past lie?

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