Immigration Lawyer in Ontario

Most refusals come down to a small number of findings, and they repeat. For visitor and study permit applications the commonest is that the officer was not satisfied you would leave Canada at the end of your authorised stay, usually expressed as weak ties to your home country, a purpose of travel that does not match a temporary stay, or funds that were not established.

Study permits also fail where the study plan does not hold together: a programme that repeats qualifications you already have, or that has no evident link to what you intend to do afterwards.

Spousal and common law applications turn on whether the relationship is genuine, and applications of every kind can be refused for an incomplete submission that was returned rather than assessed.

The finding to take seriously is misrepresentation. A finding under section 40 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act carries a five year bar on applying again, and it can follow from an omission as easily as from something stated. If a procedural fairness letter has raised it, answer it with advice rather than on your own.

The refusal letter is a summary, often little more than boxes ticked against standard grounds. The officer's reasoning sits in the Global Case Management System notes, and those are obtained through an access to information request to IRCC.

The request has to be made by a Canadian citizen, a permanent resident, or a person present in Canada, so an applicant abroad needs somebody in Canada to file it for them. IRCC has 30 days to respond under the legislation, although extensions are common and you should assume longer.

Those notes decide what happens next. They show whether the officer misread a document, applied the wrong test, or reached a conclusion the evidence did not support, and that is the difference between a refusal worth challenging and one better answered with a stronger fresh application. Ordering them early is worth it, because the filing deadline does not pause while you wait.

The deadline runs from the day you received the decision, not the day you decided to do something about it. For a decision made inside Canada you have 15 days to file. For a decision made outside Canada you have 60 days. Those periods come from section 72 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.

A sponsorship refusal that carries a right of appeal to the Immigration Appeal Division runs on its own timetable, normally 30 days from the day you received the refusal. The letter usually states which route is open to you.

An extension can be asked for, and it is sometimes granted, but it has to be justified and the argument is far stronger when the delay is short. If the date on your letter is close, say so when you call rather than waiting for an appointment that suits everyone.

Both can be paid to represent you before Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, and for a straightforward application a consultant is the cheaper route. The difference matters once a matter leaves IRCC.

Only a lawyer can act for you at the Federal Court of Canada. If a refusal has to be challenged by judicial review, or a stalled file needs a mandamus application, that work cannot be done by a consultant. A consultant can appear at some Immigration and Refugee Board hearings, depending on their class of licence.

This is why the firm charges two consultation rates rather than one. If your matter is an ordinary filing, you should not be paying lawyer rates to be told so.

You explain the situation, in English, Hindi, Gujarati, Punjabi or Urdu, and you are told where you stand. Not what you would like to hear, and not a decision dressed up as a certainty, because nobody can promise you an outcome that an officer or a judge controls.

You leave with the position stated plainly, the realistic options ranked, the likely timeline, and any deadline written down. If the honest answer is that there is no good route, you are told that too, and you have not spent a retainer finding out.

Kapil Rathod is the principal lawyer and carries the Federal Court and Immigration and Refugee Board work himself. He began in immigration in 2011 as a Regulated Canadian Immigration Consultant and was called to the Bar in Canada in 2019, so the application side and the litigation side of the same refusal are familiar to him.

Day to day contact is usually with a named case manager rather than with reception. You are told who that is at the outset, and the firm works in English, Hindi, Gujarati, Punjabi and Urdu throughout rather than only at the first meeting.

Tell the firm rather than IRCC's general enquiry line. A marriage, a birth, a new job, a criminal charge, an expired passport or a move to a new address can each change what should be filed, and some of them create a duty to update an application that is already in the system.

Changes that are reported late look like omissions when an officer finds them later. Reported early they are usually just an update.