Bread Baker. Earth Shaker. Rules Breaker
Once More on Why I and Elena Aren’t in Canada
Once More on Why I and Elena Aren’t in Canada

Once More on Why I and Elena Aren’t in Canada

I just came up with a blog post based on a friend’s question/comment saying that I should have stayed in Canada for another year to satisfy Elena’s residency requirements to be considered worthy of Canadian citizenship.

As I’m sure you’ve mentioned to her a few times (or at least said silently to yourself) if you guys had just stayed that one more year in Victoria … I guess when you are that young, a year still seems like a long time.

Leaving Canada was a multi-factor decision. There was no way Immigration was going to give my partner citizenship after Elena turned down a golden offer from CSIS to spy on Ukrainians and Russians in exchange for ‘immigration favours’. She was also outspoken on environmental and human rights issues, while not being a flag-waver for Canada’s trademark optics.

Immigration-wise, the first sign that snubbing Canada’s spook agency wasn’t a good move, was Elena’s request for a refugee hearing being actually lost on someone’s desk for three years (at a time they were taking 2 weeks to a month to grant). It took Denise Savoie NDP mp and speaker of the house at the time, to shake it loose. Another ouch for the Canadian gov. And that was just the beginning… Next came unfathomable screwups getting permanent residency, or a laminated card even. The UN HRC mandated refugee travel document was another nightmare with every step somehow misplaced, misspelled, misdirected.

Involving a powerful, Vancouver based lawyer ramped Immigration’s resolve to put Elena in her place. The shite hit the fan in a myriad of unmistakably accidentally-on-purpose screw-ups and delays, and even a threatening phone call from an irate minister of immigration and citizenship. The lawyer admitted, Elena had less than a snowball’s chance in hell of being granted citizenship in her lifetime. Immigration eventually threatened our lives and our vessel by denying Elena a refugee travel document (which is mandatory under international law, as Canada is a member state of the UN and a signatory to the UN convention on human rights) in late fall, with winter coming down on us and our tropical, plastic, sailboat in Nova Scotia. We could take our case to the UN and top up her (the lawyer’s) retainer to a tune I hadn’t a hope of whistling by then, just to catch the gov wonks on playing dirty in a thousand little ways, which is how Canada plays it, according to the plethora of cases they deal with, with far richer clients than us. Instead, we went to the press, went viral, and by crikey, did that kick the hornet’s nest!

By then we had long since lost my (our) Oak Bay dream home in the legal pissing contest, and ended up living on our boat in Victoria’s inner harbour aerodrome within a rather colourful, yet not quite ‘our’ community, bunch of homeless live-aboards. So, another year of being pissed on by drug addicts; vagrants; live-aboards who hated our guts for supporting proper disposal of sewage, oil and industrial waste; the ministry of transport who hated our guts for joining a group to protest the jet fuel, jet exhaust, aircraft noise, and cruise ship exhaust in Victoria’s vital, historic and scenic inner harbour; and CIC (Canada Immigration and Citizenship) which had gone full-on pit-bull against my UN declared, refugee, LGBT partner — for: snubbing a spook on her first day off the boat? Or for speaking up? — or for both, and in that order.

Who in their right mind, or with a boat or functional mode of transportation under their feet, and pretty much nothing left to lose, is going to “stay that one more year in Victoria…” to satisfy presence requirements (which had already been met) in a process that was demonstrably: dirty? corrupt? degrading? hopeless? futile? tilting at windmills?

We weren’t stupid, and legal costs aside, what is yet another year of one’s life actually worth? How much life should one waste, or in this case defile and desecrate for a nearly-zero chance of winning in a rigged game? We knew staying-and-playing was not only gambling — not only with money, but with limited time we have alive — but ludicrously self-destructive. So, we let slip our malignant moorings; we bent canvas to wind; we abandoned shit, and we got the dodge out of hell.