"Not Genuine" — Overturned on Appeal

Our client and her husband had met in 2019, maintained a relationship through the pandemic across two countries, married in 2021, and immediately began the sponsorship process. By the time the visa officer assessed the application in 2022, they had three years of documented relationship history.

The officer refused. His conclusion: the marriage was not genuine. The sponsor — a Canadian citizen who had built her life here, who had a career, family, and deep roots — was told her marriage was likely fabricated for immigration purposes.

A genuineness finding at the visa stage is not just a refusal — it is a formal allegation of misrepresentation-adjacent conduct. When the IAD considers an appeal, the refusal record travels with the case. The burden falls on the sponsor to affirmatively demonstrate, at a hearing, that the relationship is genuine and that the marriage was not entered into primarily for immigration purposes.

Failure at the IAD would leave a lasting mark on both the sponsor and her husband's immigration histories.

IAD appeals are quasi-judicial proceedings. The Member hears oral evidence, reviews documentary evidence, and applies a standard of correctness: the question is whether, on the evidence before the IAD (including new evidence not before the visa officer), the marriage is genuine. We approached this as trial preparation.

We organized the evidence chronologically and thematically: the relationship's origins, its development, communications, in-person visits, family introductions, shared finances, and post-marriage life. We prepared our client and her husband for detailed oral testimony, anticipating the types of questions — including curveball questions — that IAD Members routinely ask to probe relationship knowledge.

Beyond presenting positive evidence of the relationship, we submitted a legal memorandum arguing that the officer's original finding was itself unreasonable. The officer had focused on minor inconsistencies in the couple's descriptions of how they celebrated a specific holiday — the kind of peripheral factual difference that, according to the Federal Court's consistent jurisprudence, cannot bear the full weight of a "not genuine" finding without a comprehensive weighing of all available positive evidence.

We cited Sandhu v. Canada and Gill v. Canada for the proposition that peripheral inconsistencies do not override extensive positive evidence of a genuine relationship. The IAD Member agreed.