29-05-2025
In its bid to rescue Afghans, Ottawa is fracturing their families
Every few days, I text a 22-year-old Afghan woman hiding in Pakistan to make sure the men have not come to her door and dragged her, along with her three teenaged brothers and sisters, into a van headed to the northern border.
When they appear on Wazhma's street – the bearded guys with Taliban links who've said they want to force her into a marriage back home in Kabul, or the mustachioed guys from the Pakistani military who are on a campaign to deport Afghans – she orders her siblings to turn off all the lights and crouch silently in the back room.
Wazhma is far from a passive victim. In fact, she's a recognized expert in this particular fate, having a job with an organization that protects Afghan girls from forced marriage. And she's worked for journalists, including me, as a credited researcher and translator for my reporting, with Zia Rehman, on the flight of Afghans.
What makes her case frustrating, for her and for those of us who are trying to get her out of that apartment, is that she is part of a Canadian family.
They were among the many Afghans who fled during the Taliban takeover in the summer of 2021, because they'd worked for Western organizations despised by the theocratic regime. Wazhma's father died during the flight.
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Her mother and older sister, who married a Canadian in the 2010s, live in Mississauga, Ont., where they are legal residents, and are well on their way to citizenship; her mother had to come to Toronto without her kids to get refugee status.
Hers is one of many families that have been divided across continents, often for years and under great threat, by a structural flaw in Canada's immigration systems.
Contrary to the federal Liberal pledge to focus on permanent immigration and reunification of families rather than temporary individuals, the rules tend to divide families into individual cases. This often forces children, parents and siblings to apply separately, wait years longer, and sometimes get rejected multiple times. Afghans are far from the only victims of that flaw, but often face danger because of it.
Wazhma has fallen into one of that system's many paradoxes. At 22, she is one year too old to be considered a 'dependent child' under Canadian rules; the fact that she cares for her three young siblings means she can't apply as an individual through most refugee, labour or educational pathways, since Ottawa doesn't recognize sibling relationships as 'dependants,' so the children would be left stranded in Pakistan. Though programs were created to handle such special cases, they generated years-long waitlists and have mostly been shut down.
After a year of work on Wazhma's case by a circle of people including a number of prominent Canadians, we finally secured three refugee-sponsorship slots through a charitable organization this year. Ottawa was adamant that the children would each have to be processed as separate refugee claims – and that there wasn't a spot for the fourth child, who will have to be the subject of an appeal. Despite the danger she faces, Wazhma will likely have to wait until 2026 to get here.
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She is more fortunate than Naveed Mazaher, another Afghan hiding in Pakistan whose case was brought to my attention by his Canadian sponsors. His tight-knit family was admitted as part of Ottawa's rescue program in 2021, when he was 25, because his sister had worked for the Canadian government, and they together faced Taliban threats as a result. Last year, Ottawa told him to move to Islamabad so he could await his humanitarian visa and join his family in Canada.
Then, last October, Mr. Mazaher was told that his visa had been cancelled. The timing, just as the Trudeau government was shutting down every immigration and refugee stream to reduce numbers, wasn't surprising.
The reason, according to a letter he received from an immigration official, was: Mr. Mazaher's wife is an Afghan with Russian dual citizenship, earned by her family during the Soviet occupation (they'd not lived there or learned the language). Therefore, the official wrote, 'I have determined that you have a durable solution in Russia because you are married to a Russian citizen … which provides a pathway to permanent residence in Russia.'
That Canada would, in 2025, consider Russia a safe third country for an Afghan male of military-conscription age is almost unthinkable. Mr. Mazaher is now subject to a federal court challenge that will cost his Canadian sponsors and relatives tens of thousands of dollars, and the Canadian government more.
There is expert consensus, as I observed in a recent essay, that Canada's immigration system produces better integration and economic outcomes if it keeps families together. At the moment, it often seems perversely engineered to drive them apart.
