MONTREAL — A French family who immigrated to Montreal after being wooed by a Canadian embassy official in Paris have been told they must leave the country because their daughter has cerebral palsy and places an “excessive burden on social services.”
David Barlagne settled in Montreal with his wife and two daughters in 2005, hoping to start a computer software business. Barlagne said he had warned Canadian authorities that his daughter, Rachel, has cerebral palsy, a congenital neurological disorder that causes lifelong uncoordinated physical movement.
“I asked whether this would be a problem, and I was told that once my business was established in Canada after a couple of years, I could make a request for permanent residency and it would simply be a formality,” Barlagne recalled.
Four years later, his business is thriving, and his wife, Sophie, teaches French to immigrants as a volunteer.
But Citizenship and Immigration Canada has rejected Barlagne’s request for permanent residency because Rachel, 7, is considered “medically inadmissible.”
[More]
Kick this family out of Canada, but let the Tamils stay.
As Mary has demonstrated, their “Frenchness” might keep them in if enough self-described real-Canadians protest. Even healthy Tamils are considered to be more of a drain on the system (and other things left unmentioned)
I do not think this family should be deported, but I do think those tamils on that ship should be sent back to where ever they come from.
A few years ago a specialist, working in a Calgary hospital, paying his own way, was deported because he had a disabled daughter. He was willing to put up a bond of somekind to guarantee she would never be a drain on the government.
Canada’s loss, and he returned to the US where he had immigrated from.
Who makes those decisions.
I do not think this family should be deported, but I do think those tamils on that ship should be sent back to where ever they come from.
That was fairly obvious from the first post. Why can’t the nice, harmless looking French family go back where they came from? You need to elaborate a bit.
One issue I have is that the Tamils did not enter into any kind of legal arrangement to enter Canada.
I didnt get it from the story, but I assume the French family followed the accepted procedures.
And finally……………. FOUR YEARS they have been in Canada?
Am I to understand it took FOUR YEARS to make this decision?
You are wrong Mary,that family should be deported.
For no other reason than no matter how much they contribute,they can never pay for the cost to Canadian tax payers of their daughters disability.
It is a cost that will have to be paid long after her parents are dead and buried and that is a cost we can no longer afford.
As for you cynapse,it’s time you woke up,simply put,immigration is not your friend.
Lee:
Unfortunately it does take that long to make such decsisions. Often, with single people under review, it gives them enough time to fine someone to marry locally – thus avoiding deportation (seen this a few times)
Mr.G:
Immigration is not YOUR friend. We are not in the same boat by any stretch of the imagination. Never will be. I’m one of those evil 2nd gens (at least on one side) you prattle on about. I also come from outside the GTA and given what the average 3rd+ gen kid is up to these days … Canada would fall apart without the migration of skilled labour. We only need so many estheticians.
Let’s keep in mind that this article was obviously written from a sympathetic perspective (as opposed to an unbiased one) and there’s likely a good deal more to the story than what appears.
For instance, I can’t quite imagine a consular official “wooing” someone to come to Canada.
Mr.g, at what point will you realize there’s a difference between the refugee process and the immigration process? While I have some issues with both processes, I don’t bear the blind hatred which you manifest.
Whether immigrant or refugee we DO NOT need the numbers of people coming to Canada that are arriving here every year,no matter what anybody has to say.
Canada is known as a moderate country so why do we have to have the most radical immigration system in the history of the world.
Why do we let into Canada and other Western countries SCORES of low life scumbag,gun toting drug dealers,TERRORISTS,spies,rapists,murderers,AIDS spreaders,fraud artists,cheats,scoundrels and enemies of Western Civilisation ?
A series of loaded questions based on the assumption that the third world has nothing to offer but “scumbags”. Your points system is supposed to weed undesirable people out and it is doing a better job than the Mr.G’s of bygone eras did with incoming Italians (who brought the mafia) / Irish (who brought lynching) / Poles / etc – but I guess European criminals can’t be the enemies of Western civilization since they’re from the West, right?
You’d be way further ahead not to try and blind us with the crime/vagrancy issue. You just don’t want “third world” people here, period.
Geez Mr. g – The North American aboriginals must have felt the same way when the first Europeans came ashore. ‘Well, there goes the neighborhood’ must have been going through their minds.
Whether or not these people were invited, would it be safe to assume they are here legally?
It seems they are productive people. The daughter’s condition was known when they got here FOUR YEARS ago.
I can not believe that the Canadian populace would want these productive and (assuming again) law-abiding people deported because we do not want to be bothered by this girls medical condition.
Do we need to go down the road about how many millions of dollars have been spent on issues much less worthy than this?
Do we need to go down the road about how much has been spent on people who are here illegally?
Jason Kenny, Get on this right now. We cannot be a sort of country that rejects this family for those stupid reasons. We are better than that.
Or are we?
Your double damn right Undecided Voter,and maybe if the Natives had been a little more discriminating as to whom they let in things might be a little different for them right now.
Maybe if the Natives had been more discriminating and said no disease carriers and no drug dealers(alcohol) things might of turned out better for them!!!!!!!!!
We should learn from their mistakes.
What people like Lee(comment 12) don’t understand is that we cannot have immigrants(or their children) that are a burden on our system.
No matter how hard this family works their contribution will not EVER,EVER,EVER cover the costs of the daughter’s Cerebral Palsy.
That is why they must be deported.
It might be a different story if the family had 5 kids and the burden could be spread over the lifetime contribution of the other four children,but that is not the case.
Mr. G.
Give me a break please.
I understand your point perfectly.
And of course i disagree with it.
First of all, i am not sure what the cost to our medical system is. Even with that uncertainty, I doubt that the burden is catastrophic.
Secondly, While I do not like the gun-toting, drug dealing, alcoholic immigrants either, to equate this girls plight with those criminals is (with the greatest of respect) nonsense.
Thirdly, do we not provide aid to all kinds of ills all over the world? Isnt it easier to provide some aid to one in our own country?
We are a compassionate country. Lets show a little here.
AND ONE MORE THING………………….
(Dam, i got myself wound up now,)
We have let this family come into our country, settle down and work productively for FOUR YEARS!
And now all of a sudden, after allowing this situation to develop, (yes, we allowed it) somebody in their infinite wisdom is going to uproot this family simply because their daughter has a medical condition.
Think long and hard about this, folks. There is an ugly undertone here that is distasteful.
Jason Kenny, get your butt in gear and fix this.
Mr G really needs to define “contribution”. In terms of tax revenue, business owners have a non-linear effect on contribution, since they pay taxes and their employees (who may have otherwise not had a job or had a lesser job) also pay taxes. Assuming the daughter does not outlive the father, there is no reason to believe the family hasn’t “paid up”.
Moreover, our health care system is a glorified group plan. People aren’t supposed to take out exactly what they put in. The sick get what they need and those of us who don’t get sick don’t get refunds. That’s how insurance works.
If this family should be deported due to the cost of their daughters illness, how about refusing everyone with aids into Canada. They also cost a lot. With a very disabled g/child in my family I know what it costs.
Has this family been working for 4 yrs, or on welfare. How many families have brought in members under the reunification program, only to renege on their promise to support them. Are those members deported because they are a drain on the taxpayers. No, in some cases it appears they get more than those on OAS. And IRuby wants to recind the amount of time they must live here to qualify.
Our whole immigration program needs a complete overhaul.
It is difficult to carry on a reasoned debate when only one side of this story has been presented. From my end all I have to do is think back to a few of the many absolute scum of the earth that I have witnessed Canada allow to stay here legally. One that sticks out in my mind, a recently arrived refugee (I remember from which country but it serves no useful purpose to name it) grabs a young Canadian teenage girl off the street and brutally rapes her at knifepoint. All he gets is a couple of years in the slammer for absolutely destroying this young innocent Canadian’s life. Why the light sentence? Because the Canadian court felt sorry for him and attributed significant blame to the society he came from as being at least partially responsible for his mindset. B.S.! He knew full well that grabbing young women off the street and brutally raping them at knifepoint wasn’t an accepted social activity here in Canada, but he did it anyway. The vast majority of right thinking Canadians would argue that not deporting him is not worth the risk that letting him stay because of the risk he poses to other Canadian women. Doesn’t matter because immigration tried to deport him but was overruled and the pathetic excuse for a human being is allowed to stay. Canada eventually will grant him full citizenship, probably already has by now. Why was he not deported? Because he successfully argued that he would be at risk of physical injury or death if he is sent back where he came from. So the courts had to weigh the physical safety of future innocent Canadian women against the potential physical safety of this violent foreign sexual offender. So you can see where some might view this apparent law abiding French fella and his family being allowed to stay in Canada in somewhat of a different light than the animal that should have been sent back to the hell hole that spawned him no matter what the risk (if any) to him. I suggest that there are far more deserving individuals that could be issued these 3 one way plane tickets (that taxpayers will have to pay for) than to ‘waste them’ to remove this family.
Right on Cynapse.
Hell, i would bet that even though i had been employed for over 50 years, i have not contributed enough to cover what i have cost the medical system.
I cant imagine where they will send me though.
Hey, heres an idea !
We need an isolated island for people like me to get us out of the Canadian society and thus reduce the burden.
Make sure its in the tropics.
I think Lee’s asking us to please please throw him in the Briar Patch …LOL
Re: previous — This is interesting. When I put the story up it appealed to me but I doubted it would start any serious discussion. That shows how wrong I can be.
“Anyhoooo”…my views are inline with Lee and a few others. This situation needs to be stopped primarily because they have been in the country for over four years and their situation was well known to our government. They are also productive members of our society creating jobs for Canadians unlike some who come here and contribute nothing to our country.
Jason Kenney — “Pick up.”
It is very easy to vilify people like my great-great-great grandparants who came over to Canada to fight the people who lived here for property. My ancestors came from the British Isles (most of them from Scotland), they had been impoverished by the Highland Clearences and costly wars. They came with ambition, some education and trade and farming skills. As soon as they landed in Canada the whole family went to work ; no gument help from the established North American Indian residents! My family did not recieve any compensation for their property in the Highlands from the Almighty British conquers, they did issue an oral apology in 1998 however; essentially my ancestors were in the same boat as the NA Indians – conquered people! I believe that the NA Indians have the right to move to GB, if they so choose so there is no difference in the circumstances….why the polorized attitude? We are all people.
As for the family in Montreal, I tend to agree with Mac, there is likely a lot more to this story and until I know the whole story I cannot pass an opinion.
I do know that the citizens of Canada have been forced to pay for ‘social security’ thingies since WWI, the most expensive and intrusive being the Old Age Pension, income tax and Medicare. Our gument took our money to fund these health/bureaucratic monsters without our permission; now we are forced to fund sick/poor people who land on our shores, without our permission. This country also ‘funds’ people who land here without our permission…how is this Just?…the newcommers have access to all the benifits that we were forced to pay for but have no intention of ever funding these oppresssive, expensive programs themselves. The many people who import sick, old, unproductive relatives to ‘use’ our investments is criminal ; IMO. An easy way to fix this would be to deny uninvested newcommers access to state welfare, and to wean our own citizens off this nanny system by offering young people private options. Old citizens, of course, should be grandfathered in medicare benifits because no private company would sell old people medical/pension coverage.
If Canada had courage and ambition, we would push for this privatization plan. The people who built the infrastructure in this nation took care of themselves and their families (I had an aunt who had the sleeping sickness in the 1930′s; the fever burnt her brain out when she was a baby, our family took care of her until she died at age 8; at the same time her Dad, my Grandad, had to have a kidney removed, he sold his life insurance (at my Grandma’s insistance), to pay for the operation. Grandad was a tough man, he survived the first kidney removal opperation in Sask., he paid for the opperation and he lived to go on plowing fields and herding cows until he was 75 years old. This all happened in the 1930′s in S. Sask. My Grandparants had food and meat in those terrible days and my Mom told me that they fed 10-12 people very often because the people passing by were starving. My Dad’s Dad died in 1933 of the same disease that my little aunt had had – it was carried by livestock – that Grandad was at home when a high fever made him slightly crazy, he got out of bed, hitched up his team to do some seeding and he died in his boots. Dad was 12 and he took over from his Dad, he did not quit school, he just seldom attended and he passed every grade. Dad joined a band and played for local dances for his own fun and to finance his tobacco and his dought ridden farm taxes. My Mom’s Dad, her brother and my Great Uncles rounded up mustangs in Montana, broke them for farm use and sold/ gave them to other people who had lost their teams to starvation or had sold or eaten them.
My family strongly oppposed all CCF policies because we had our own policies, we were forced to pay for these scams through taxes . We have used the system we were forced to pay for because there were no other options – my Dad died in a hospital after spending one day there, he did not want my Mom to have to deal with his corpse so he phoned the ambulance to come and pick him up when he knew death was on his doorstep.
What has this family done to earn these same benifits? Just asking.
Re: #23 — “What has this family done to earn these same benifits? Just asking.”
I think you answered your own question, Jema:
“My ancestors came from the British Isles (most of them from Scotland), they had been impoverished by the Highland Clearences and costly wars. They came with ambition, some education and trade and farming skills. As soon as they landed in Canada the whole family went to work ; no gument help from the established North American Indian residents!”
As you and Mac have both said — we don’t know it all yet and we need to wait for it.
For now I feel “Full Stop” on deportation until we hear the “rest of the story”.
And Happy New Year.
Happy New Year to you, too, Jack – and to all your fabulous posters and commentators. May this New Year be one in which you have many wishes – comming true!
Cheers!
DO YOU BELIEVE – for only athletes? We as Canadians should protest the Barlagne family being forced from our country because their child has Cerebral Palsy. From 1869-1960, our various governments brought 130,000 British Home Children (ages 3-15) here to work as domestics and labourers to help establish the west, working for/as agricultural settlers. Yesterday, England’s Prime Minister Brown apologized to their descendants of their part in this masterful piece of mismanagement – “Expedient, opportunistic, misguided and flawed.” quote -March 19, 2003, Professor Margaret McNay, U of Western Ontario.
In future, who will have to apologize for the Barlagne family being deluded to the potential opportunities for them here, & then sending them back to France after their 4 productive years. This family was guaranteed permanent residency once a business was established – even when the daughter’s condition was known. The honourable decision is for this family to be allowed to stay in Canada. Thank you.