After Canada’s minister of democratic institutions confirmed Thursday that she was actually born in Iran and not Afghanistan, an immigration lawyer says stories such as that of Maryam Monsef are “extremely common” and says a review is unlikely.
The 31-year-old minister built her political career on the narrative that she was an Afghan refugee who fled to Canada in 1996 with her mother and two sisters where she eventually overcame the odds to become Canada’s first Afghan-born MP. In June, Robert Fife, then host of CTV’s Question Period, asked Monsef about her birthplace and she responded that she believed she was born in Afghanistan. Last week, Fife, reporting for The Globe and Mail, inquired again about her early life and Monsef finally learned from her mother that she was actually born in Mashhad, Iran.
On Thursday, Monsef released a statement in which she said she believed she was from Afghanistan when she listed it as her country of birth on her Canadian passport application. The statement also said that she would be taking steps to “rectify this unintentional error.”
Immigration lawyer, Lorne Waldman, told CTV’s Your Morning on Friday that Monsef’s case is “extremely common” among refugees moving to Canada. He said that his office sees dozens of applicants everyday who don’t know what happened or where they were born, especially the children of refugees.
“It happens for different reasons,” he said. “It happens because parents are trying to protect their children. It happens because parents are desperate and they’re given bad advice and they misrepresent facts on applications in order to bring their families to safety.”
Waldman said that Monsef will have to go through all the regular legal processes to change her passport and date of birth but she won’t have to reapply for Canadian citizenship. However, because her citizenship application was based on her permanent residency, which she obtained using false information, Waldman said it raises some questions about possible consequences for Monsef and her mother.
“Legally, the immigration and citizenship laws allow the government to review a person’s status if there’s been a misrepresentation,” he said.
Waldman believes Monsef shouldn’t face any kind of review given that it was her mother who made the error on the documents and that it happened so many years ago.
“It’s not the type of case that we should be spending our resources on and taking action,” he said.
Even though Waldman believes that Monsef’s citizenship shouldn’t be investigated, he said she and her mother still could face possible repercussions for the error, intentional or not, because of the previous Conservative government’s changes to Canada’s citizenship laws. He said that former immigration minister, Jason Kenney, began a crackdown on fraudulent applications in 2011 which led to new measures that made it easier for the government to revoke citizenship if it was discovered someone lied on their application. Waldman said that because these rules are still being enforced by the Liberal government, Monsef and her mother could potentially be subjected to them.
“The current government has to consider whether these are the types of cases we should be going after,” he said.
