Refused Twice. Won on Third.

Our client's husband had been waiting in their home country for over a year. She was in Canada on a valid work permit, paying taxes, building a life — and her husband could not join her. IRCC had refused his spousal open work permit application twice. Each refusal cited the same vague conclusion: the officer was not satisfied the relationship was genuine.

No specific inconsistency was identified. No evidence was flagged as problematic. Just a conclusion — stamped twice — that unravelled a family.

A genuineness finding is not simply a denial of convenience. It is an implicit allegation that a couple fabricated or misrepresented their relationship to obtain immigration status. That allegation, once made, carries weight in future applications.

Our client's husband faced not just a separation from his wife, but the prospect of that finding shadowing every immigration application he ever made. And throughout this, our client — a lawful, contributing resident of Canada — had no pathway to family reunification.

We conducted a thorough review of both prior applications and their GCMS notes. In both cases, we found that the officers had focused on minor inconsistencies in responses to standard questions — the kind of minor discrepancies that immigration researchers and the Federal Court have repeatedly noted are normal in genuine relationships.

We gathered an extensive body of evidence: joint financial records, years of communication logs, third-party attestations from family members, and a comprehensive relationship chronology. We then filed for judicial review of the second refusal, arguing the officer's credibility assessment was both unreasonable and procedurally unfair.

The jurisprudence is clear: visa officers may not treat minor, peripheral inconsistencies as determinative of relationship genuineness without a thorough weighing of all available positive evidence. The officers had done exactly that.

We also argued that where an officer intends to rely on credibility concerns, procedural fairness requires that those specific concerns be put to the applicant. They were not. We presented a comprehensive factum with supporting Federal Court authorities, including Kaur v. Canada and Singh v. Canada, establishing the standard the officer had failed to meet.