More cultural enrichment in Canada: the importation of polygamy, child brides, forced marriages

Posted on by

From The Ottawa Sun

Polygamy, child brides pose problems for immigration officials

By BRIAN LILLEY, Parliamentary Bureau

Last Updated: October 12, 2010 4:13pm

OTTAWA – Forced marriages, child brides, polygamy and arranged marriages between first cousins are some of the problems that Canadian immigration officials in Pakistan have to deal with.

The revelations are contained in a 26-page report prepared by Canadian officials working out of the immigration and visa office in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad. The report was obtained by immigration lawyer Richard Kurland through access to information legislation and supplied to QMI Agency.

“With few exceptions, the Islamabad spousal reunification programme involves Muslim proxy marriages arranged by the families, the vast majority of which take place between first cousins,” reads the report.

According to Kurland, polygamy is most common among wealthy Pakistani families trying to immigrant to Canada. Canadian officials often won’t reject an application just because a man has more than one wife, Kurland said.

“They say we can’t do this because you are polygamists so you have to divorce some, keep one and work it out domestically,” Kurland said. Kurland told QMI that often second or third wives will be sponsored into Canada as skilled workers for a business or as a maid for the household.

As for first cousins marrying, while the practice is not common in Canada due to a higher risk of birth defects, marrying your cousin is legal in this country.

“Marriages that are legal in Canada are legal for the purposes of immigration and sponsorship,” said Alykhan Velshi, a spokesman for Immigration Minister Jason Kenney.

Tazeen Ahmad, a British woman of Pakistani descent, produced a documentary earlier this year for Channel 4 called Dispatches: When Cousins Marry.

Ahmad documented the cultural reasons for the practice among British Pakistanis as well as the problems, such as a high rate of recessive gene disorders.

2 Replies to “More cultural enrichment in Canada: the importation of polygamy, child brides, forced marriages”

  2. Pakistani’s can immigrate to Canada even if they have more than one spouse, as long as they land and stay in Saskatchewan. Section 51 of the Saskatchewan Family Property Act specifically grants powers to Federally appointed Queens Bench justices to sanction multiple spouses in that province. The province has already argued twice under the constitutional questions act, that sanctions are available by provincial powers to persons that claim to have more than one spouse in that province. The federal AG has declined to attend these constitutional cases to argue that the province is acting illegally in sanctioning, forcing and assisting single persons to “become the spouse of a person who has a spouse.”