A Guinean residing in Quebec and threatened with expulsion turns to the courts to resolve “unusual immigration processing times in the family reunification category”. Kaba Keita criticizes the Quebec government for having caused “unreasonable” waiting times for immigrants awaiting sponsorship.
Mr. Keita filed a legal motion in the Superior Court of Quebec on Thursday. The applicant, who is represented by immigration lawyer Maxime Lapointe, is suing the Quebec government to “force it to establish an annual threshold allowing families destined for Quebec to benefit from a processing time similar to applicants destined for outside Quebec.
It is the federal government that processes requests for family reunification. However, Quebec has established a ceiling of some 10,000 immigrants in this category for 2024, and Ottawa cannot exceed it. Result: files are piling up at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.
Last December, the waiting time to settle permanently with loved ones in Quebec was 41 months. Me Lapointe, who wants to reduce this period to 12 months, had also sent a formal notice to the federal and Quebec immigration ministries in December asking them to act. “I saw that the federal government seemed willing to deal with the files, but when I saw that Quebec did not want to, well, I understood that the culprit was Quebec,” underlined the lawyer in interview with The dutyTHURSDAY.
Threatened with expulsion
The applicant in this case, Kaba Keita, is a Guinean national who arrived in Quebec in 2018, the year he subsequently filed an asylum application in Canada. He then said he feared returning to his family in Guinea. Since 2020, he has been married to Doussou Koulibaly, an immigrant, also Guinean, who obtained her permanent residence several years ago.
In March 2022, after obtaining refugee status, Mr. Keita affirmed under oath in a hearing before the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada that his relationship with his family had improved, according to his lawyer . His status was then revoked. He has lived under threat of deportation ever since.
The media coverage of Mr. Keita’s case in 2022, as well as a series of protests, allowed him to obtain a reprieve and to temporarily stay in Quebec territory, in Quebec, where he has worked for five years as a dishwasher at the Le Continental restaurant. However, he is still waiting for a request for family reunification made with his wife.
“In the absence of a decision in its sponsorship file, the[Agence des services frontaliers du Canada] will execute a removal from Canada,” his lawyer writes in the motion.
“There are plenty of cases like Kaba Keita. People for whom processing times are exceeded compared to the rest of Canada, it is not difficult to find,” underlined M.e Lapointe on the other end of the phone, Thursday.
Based on this situation, he asks the Court to “declare inapplicable, invalid or inoperative the immigration planning” of the Quebec government to force it to establish new, more conciliatory thresholds for immigrants awaiting a sponsorship or to outright force it to cancel these thresholds. It also demands that the government recognize “the processing times for the family reunification category as unreasonable and unusual.”
Legault inflexible
The Minister of Immigration, Christine Fréchette, did not want to comment on the case on Thursday, pleading that it was “judicialized”. Its migration plan does not plan to increase the threshold for family reunification next year. It would thus remain frozen at 10,400 people.
From Morin-Heights, Thursday, Prime Minister François Legault took the liberty of defending his government’s immigration thresholds. “Currently, we cannot […] explode the number of people undergoing family reunification for the same reasons that I mentioned earlier: we are not capable of providing the services,” he said. “Then, there is also a capacity for integration into the French language because there are no requirements [pour le regroupement familial]. »
The CAQ elected official also attacked the Parti Québécois, which had indicated, through its immigration spokesperson, Stéphane Handfield, that “the CAQ [Coalition avenir Québec] has favored the economic aspect for years” in its thresholds and that “it could now give greater importance to family reunification”.
“I am surprised to see the spokesperson for the Parti Québécois [PQ] to say that we should increase the number of family reunifications, while there is no requirement for knowledge of French, launched the Prime Minister. Does this mean that the PQ no longer cares about the future of French? I don’t understand. »