Rhonda Floriant has only seen her husband once since March 2020. “When you look at nine months without seeing each other, and now we’re at another six months without seeing each other, it makes it impossible, it’s just incredibly hard,” says Floriant, who lives in Goderich, Ont. Floriant’s husband is in the Dominican Republic right now, awaiting word on when he might be able to join his wife in Huron County. The two were married in November of 2018, and applied for family sponsorship in October of 2019.

https://london.ctvnews.ca/covid-19-slows-immigration-process-to-a-crawl-for-ontario-couple-1.5424807

After a second team of East Coast health workers touched down recently to help Ontario dig itself out from under a shortage of medical staff, a Ryerson professor is struggling to understand why hospitals here refuse to call on the thousands of internationally trained doctors already in our midst. “What a waste of resources,” says Shafi Bhuiyan, chair of a network that helps foreign-trained doctors find jobs in Canada. “It is unacceptable. They are not using the tools they have in hand and as a result, people are dying.”

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2021/05/11/people-are-dying-internationally-trained-doctors-forced-to-sit-on-the-sidelines-as-ontario-battles-pandemics-third-wave.html

Carlo Escario says he’s ready for his removal and return to his native Philippines — he just wants Canada to let him to stay here for 40 more days. The 36-year-old from Quezon City worked at Toronto General Hospital since 2014 as a hemodialysis assistant. Until two weeks ago, he was working directly with COVID-19 patients in the intensive-care unit. As a front-line essential health care worker, he received his first dose of the Pfizer vaccine in February, but says the appointment for the second shot isn’t until June 11.

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2021/05/11/dont-deport-me-until-i-get-my-second-dose-of-covid-19-vaccine-health-worker-asks-canada.html

Refugee claimants were asked hurtful and demeaning questions and deprived of their right to fair and impartial hearings, according to a new report that determined eight Canadian adjudicators violated their code of conduct over the past two years. The report, prepared by the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (IRB), includes findings that an adjudicator was “blunt and insensitive” when questioning a female refugee claimant who alleged she was raped.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7843566/canada-refugee-adjudicators-asked-offensive-hurtful-questions-report/

More than a decade after its publication and at least four years after it was promised, an update is coming this year to the Discover Canada: The Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship study guide. The current guide, created in 2009 and lightly updated in 2012, is provided to newcomers to learn about the nation’s history, culture and ethics in advance of the citizenship test they must pass to become Canadians. The study guide is, in essence, a distillation of how the government wants the nation to be seen.

https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/why-canada-so-badly-needs-to-update-its-citizenship-materials

Lors d’une discussion avec les leaders d’organisations francophones de partout au pays, M. Mendicino a indiqué ne pas avoir établi de plafond au nombre d’immigrants francophones qui pourront obtenir leur résidence permanente dans le cadre d’un programme annoncé le mois dernier qui vise à favoriser la rétention au pays des travailleurs essentiels qui bénéficient en ce moment d’un visa temporaire. Marco Medicino a souligné lundi que l’immigration sera un élément important de la relance économique du pays après la pandémie de la COVID-19, en plus de souligner son importance pour la vitalité des communautés francophones en milieu minoritaire. 

https://www.ledroit.com/actualites/immigration-francophone-le-federal-fait-un-pas-dans-la-bonne-direction-8b109f846fb0668d211d64d52ab1ea1c​