The Ultrahazardous Activity of Excluding Family Members in Canada’s Immigration System
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Who is family? Some of us take for granted that we, as Canadians, can not only choose who our family is but whether we can live with them in Canada. One little-known regulation in our immigration system is wreaking havoc on our family reunification system. We are told that section 117(9)(d) of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations aims to protect the integrity of our immigration system by preventing and deterring fraud in family reunification. Practically, the regulation applies to persons who, when applying to immigrate to Canada did not disclose and therefore have a family member examined by immigration officials. The regulation, when triggered, imposes a lifetime ban on the sponsor to sponsor the non-disclosed family member. The rule denies Canadian citizens and permanent residents from ever being with their family in Canada, even if they are genuine family members. This paper looks closely at this regulation and points out that the construction of the rule is one that is akin to an absolute liability regime, reserved for deterring and preventing ultrahazardous activity in criminal and tort law. When considered against evidence that indicates that the main reason why persons do not disclose their family has nothing to do with fraud, the paper argues that the regulatory regime is a prejudicial and sticky generalization that allows non-discretionary exclusion of persons from Canada. Further, while the government may feel that this regulation makes it easier to determine who is in the family class, it ignores tried and tested mechanisms already in existence to deal with fraud. Finally, the paper argues, the provision is not merely suboptimal, but inhumane and unconstitutional.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".