Ten months after the death of his wife, a Haitian “guardian angel”, who has lived in Quebec since 2018, is unable to bring back his children aged 4 and 11, who remained in Haiti in a critical situation. Despite the father’s efforts to inform Immigration Canada of the death, the file was never updated, which delays the arrival of the children who are on the verge of losing the only person who took care of them near Port -au-Prince.
“After all these times I called, all these papers sent, no one ever informed me that my wife’s file had not been canceled and that the children’s file was not moving forward because of that! I learned that on Friday,” Edvard Destin told Duty, completely discouraged. “I said to myself, ‘Wow…and I’ve been waiting all this time?’ I’m going to get depressed now. »
Since the death of his wife, Mr. Destin says he has done everything he was told to do for family reunification: he sent Immigration Canada the death certificate, photos of the funeral and filled out new forms, including including those that Quebec required to issue Quebec selection certificates (CSQ) for its children. He used the services of a law firm and even sought help from the office of Bloc Québécois MP Mario Beaulieu. “I called every week, sometimes several times a week. It was always a different agent. There are some who had not heard of the file. I had to send back all the papers several times,” explained Mr. Destin.
Mario Beaulieu confirmed to Duty that several follow-ups had been carried out by his constituency office and that, since August, the file had stagnated in the hands of the federal government, without knowing that it was heading towards a dead end since the update concerning the death had not been made by the agents. Today he is urging Immigration Minister Marc Miller to intervene to speed up the children’s application for permanent residence. “If they find themselves out there alone, they’re going to be in danger.” This is an urgent question,” declared the member for La Pointe-de-l’Île.
“Grandpa, if you come, you will die”
As Christmas approaches, Edvard Destin is consumed by worry: his friend who has taken care of his children since the death of their mother must go to the United States by December 31, otherwise he will lose his visa. ‘he managed to get. “If they don’t arrive [au Québec] within two weeks, I will have to go to Haiti to look for them,” he said. A highly dangerous enterprise given that Carrefour, a town in the suburbs of Port-au-Prince where children hide, is controlled by criminal gangs.
“My daughter told me, ‘Papi, if you come, you’ll die. We are going to ask you for sums of money and you [les] you don’t!” “said the father, who replied: “It’s better that I die trying to go to you than that you die. Because there is no one to take care of you. And bandits have no heart. » His wife is herself a collateral victim of the violence, having been unable to receive the necessary medical follow-up at the hospital for an illness which afflicted her. “She died,” Mr. Destin simply said, his voice breaking with emotion.
Edvard Destin requested asylum in Quebec in 2018, after leaving his pregnant wife and their six-year-old daughter in Haiti. “During COVID, I worked everywhere as a beneficiary attendant. In Mont-Tremblant, Matane, Laval. I did everything ! » says this “guardian angel” who became a security agent in a Montreal organization.
After obtaining his permanent residence in March 2022 thanks to the regularization program for health workers who worked on the front lines during COVID, Edvard Destin rushed to sponsor his wife and two children. It was last February, almost a year after submitting his sponsorship application, that his wife died. It has now been five years since he last saw his children. “They don’t understand what’s going on. My boy doesn’t want to talk to me anymore and my daughter sometimes says to me “you’re mean, Papi, you don’t want anyone to be with you”. »
The temporary resident visa, a solution?
The director of the Maison d’Haïti, Marjorie Villefranche, deplores the fact that “such administrative miseries” are being made for children. “It’s not even for reasons that make sense,” she says. She advocates for children to be eligible for a Temporary Resident Visa (TRV), a type of visitor visa that would allow them to await permanent residency here. “There is a way to hurry to get them back,” said M.me Villefranche.
Last May, the former Minister of Immigration, Sean Fraser, announced a series of measures so that families awaiting family reunification could be reunited sooner, and promised “accelerated processing” of VRT requests. He then claimed that 93% of these were approved and promised to process them in 30 days.
However, according to a request for access to information that The duty consulted, the acceptance rates of the various Canadian visa offices around the world vary greatly, and that of Mexico City, where Haitian applications are processed, does not exceed 50%. “The promise of 30-day deadlines is not respected either. It’s more than 100 days,” said Laurianne Lachapelle, administrator of Québec Réunié, a Quebec collective that fights against sponsorship delays.
Mme Lachapelle observes that the reasons for refusing to grant a VRT are often absurd. “We have seen children who were refused because they did not have a long enough travel history. How do you expect a 4 year old to have traveled the world! » She says she is “shocked” by the fact that the family of Mr. Destin, a “guardian angel” during COVID, did not arrive more quickly. “I can’t understand why we are letting down people who were here to save lives. »
Asked about the delays in this file, the two immigration ministries, federal and provincial, indicated to the Duty that they did not comment on individual cases. In the office of Minister Marc Miller, we also refrain from any comments for the same reasons.