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Family reunification in Canada requires that the sponsor vouches that they can financially support the sponsored immigrant and that they will not need to ask for social assistance for 3 years. They check that the sponsor is in good enough financial health to support them. If they do ask for social assistance, the government can ask the sponsor to reimburse it.
I mean, it's not perfect, but it's not like no one though of this problem.
This is all sensible, except:
3 is wildly low. If I had to make up a number I'd go for at least as long as it would take for them to qualify for citizenship. I'd start around 15 years.
That's for a spouse, the situation I'm familiar with. I checked again, and for parents and grandparents, the sponsor vouches for 20 years (except in Quebec where it's 10 years).
The number would be 3 years then. The requirement to qualify is being a permanent resident and having lived in Canada for 3 years in the last 5 years.
Okay. 3 years to be eligible for permanent residency and then Google says 5 more to be further eligible for citizenship. So 8 years from stepping foot in Canada to possibly getting citizenship.
I would have gone with 8 then. But they went with the time to permanent residency.
No, how long before you get permanent residency is dependent on what pathway you're using. My wife visited as a tourist before we started the permanent residency process, but she never actually lived here officially until she got it. Technically you don't even need to have been in Canada. You're eligible for citizenship 3 years after having started living in Canada, and once you are a permanent resident. So you could even count, for instance, years spent as a temporary resident with a student or work visa before you got permanent residency.
https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/canadian-citizenship/become-canadian-citizen.html
I see. That's not quite what Google told me, but Google is only approximately accurate.
So that means someone could become a Canadian citizen with a grand total of 3 years in Canada. Which sounds really, really low. It's five years in the US after attaining permanent residency. Which is also rather low in my opinion.
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I would guess there's a lot more sponsored immigrants that are/will be economically productive (spouses and children) than there are elderly sponsored immigrants, making it not worth writing an exception around, especially when there's a pretty compelling compassionate reason to allow the relatively few cases.
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Unfortunately, I think this runs into the same sort of issues that the foreign student process does.
For anyone who isn't aware, Canada requires that foreign students demonstrate that they have enough money to support themselves for the time that they enrolled. It sounds like a good plan, but:
My concern with the grandparents is that "supporting" their grandparents does not actually reflect all the services that they consume (healthcare, primarily), and even if it did, the government isn't going to do anything about it.
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