Rishta in Surrey

How to read a Surrey profile properly

When the marriage is really for the paperwork

This is unpleasant to write about and families deserve to read it plainly. A marriage arranged so that one party gains permanent residence, with no intention of remaining in it, is a real and recurring harm in overseas Pakistani communities, and the Lower Mainland is one of the places it is discussed most. It is fraud in Canadian law, it is a serious wrong by any reading of our own faith, and the person left behind is usually a young woman and her family.

The shape of it is consistent. A proposal arrives for a daughter or son settled in Canada from a family that is unusually eager and unusually quick. The other side pushes for a fast nikah and a fast sponsorship application. There is reluctance about long video calls, about the families speaking directly, about anybody travelling to meet. After landing, the new spouse becomes distant within weeks or months, and then leaves — sometimes to a person they were already attached to. The Canadian sponsor is left with a broken marriage, and with the sponsorship undertaking described on our Canada page, which survives the separation and makes them financially responsible for three years regardless.

The protections are not complicated and they cost nothing but time. Slow the timeline down, because urgency is the one feature almost every such case shares, and an honest family is never harmed by a few more months. Insist that the two families speak to each other directly and repeatedly, not only through an intermediary. Video call often and at ordinary hours, and meet in person if it can be managed. Ask for references who are not relatives and telephone them, as our Edmonton page describes. Be alert to pressure to keep the engagement quiet from the wider family on either side. And be very careful of anybody — a consultant, an agent, a well-connected uncle — who offers to arrange both the marriage and the immigration file as a package, particularly for a fee.

There is a second and opposite harm that families should also know about, because it catches the honest. Immigration officers assess whether a marriage is genuine, and a perfectly real arranged marriage between two people who met through their families can look thin on paper if nobody kept any evidence. So from the first day, keep the record: photographs together and with both families, the nikah nama and the civil certificate, call logs and messages, travel tickets and stamps, money transfers, and letters from the families and the mosque. A genuine couple with a thick file is rarely troubled. A genuine couple with nothing can be refused and then has to appeal.

One last thing, said directly to anybody considering being on the other side of this. A marriage entered into with no intention of keeping it is a deception of a spouse, their family and this country, and it is punishable by a bar on future sponsorship and worse. It is also the kind of thing a community remembers for a generation. Do not do it.

In British Columbia, living together makes you spouses

British Columbia sits at the opposite end of Canadian law from Quebec, and families here are very often unaware of it. Under this province’s family legislation, two people who live together in a marriage-like relationship for two years become spouses for most purposes — including division of family property and the right to spousal support — whether or not they ever registered a marriage. Our Montreal page describes a province where unmarried couples historically had no such rights at all. British Columbia is the most expansive in the country.

For our community that cuts several ways and all of them are worth knowing. A couple who have a nikah and live together but delay the civil registration are not, in this province, in the legal limbo they would be in Quebec; after two years the law will generally treat them as spouses with full property consequences. That is protective for a wife, and it is also something a family should enter knowingly rather than by accident. It matters especially for anyone who has lived with a previous partner, because a relationship that was never registered may still have left obligations behind it, and a second marriage should start with that understood rather than discovered.

Register the civil marriage anyway. The nikah alone is not a legal marriage in British Columbia any more than elsewhere in Canada, the person performing it must be a registered marriage commissioner or a religious representative authorised by the province, and the certificate is what immigration, hospitals, insurers and banks will ask for. Relying on the two-year cohabitation rule to supply rights that a licence would have given you from the first day is a poor plan.

One useful tool specific to this province. British Columbia allows couples to make a written agreement about property and support, before or during the relationship, and the courts will generally uphold a fair one made with independent legal advice on both sides. That is not an insult to anybody. It is particularly sensible in a second marriage where there are children from before, or where one side is bringing a family business or a house into the marriage, and it is the practical counterpart to recording the haq mehr properly in the nikah nama.

Cash work, and why it costs far more than the tax

In a construction and trucking economy a great deal of work is offered in cash, and in this region that is an open secret rather than a hidden one. Our Brampton page deals with being paid as a contractor rather than an employee. This is the next step down, and families should understand what it actually does to a household, because it is almost never the saving it appears to be.

Income that is not declared does not exist for any purpose except spending. It cannot be used to qualify for a mortgage, which in the most expensive housing market in North America is close to decisive — a man earning well in cash for ten years may be unable to buy a townhouse that a salaried man on less can finance. It generates no contributions towards the public pension and no employment insurance, so there is nothing behind an injury, a lay-off or old age. It produces no record for a child benefit calculation. And in a trade with real physical risk, it often means no workers compensation coverage at all, which is the detail that turns an accident into a catastrophe for a whole family.

Then the point that matters most on a matrimonial site. Sponsoring a spouse from Pakistan requires the sponsor to document their situation, and a household whose income is invisible on paper has a much harder time with anything official — immigration, a mortgage, a lease, a loan. A family that spent five years keeping income off the books and then wants to bring a daughter- in-law from Lahore discovers the cost at exactly the wrong moment.

So ask the ordinary questions without judgement, because many men in this position were never given a real choice by the people who hired them. Is the work on the books. Is there a T4 or are there invoices and a tax return. Is there workers compensation coverage on site. And if the answer is that it is all cash, a family is entitled to factor that into what the household actually is, while recognising that the man in front of them may be working extremely hard for it.

A second marriage, when there are children

This site lists divorced, widowed, khula and second-marriage profiles identically to every other, with no separate section and no marker. What no page has yet set out is the practical work of a second marriage where children already exist, and since that is a large share of the proposals we see, it belongs here.

Start with where the children live and who decides. In Canada custody and parenting time are usually settled by agreement or court order, and that order does not change because a parent remarries. If the children live with him, the new wife is joining a household with children in it from the first day, and she should meet them properly and more than once before the nikah rather than afterwards. If the children live with their mother, there will be contact arrangements, handovers and holidays that the new marriage must accommodate permanently.

Then the money, which families avoid and should not. Child support in Canada is calculated from published tables based on income and the number of children, it is a legal obligation owed to the children rather than a favour to the former spouse, and it continues regardless of remarriage. A new wife is entitled to know the figure before she agrees, because it comes out of the household every month. The same applies in reverse where she is the one receiving support or where she has children of her own.

Then the harder human part. Nobody becomes a parent by marriage, and a new wife is not a replacement mother. The arrangements that work give her a defined and respected role, do not require her to discipline children who already have two parents, and do not expect instant affection in either direction. Be honest with the children about who she is. Be honest with her about what the former spouse’s continuing presence in the family’s life will be. And if there are children on both sides, talk about how the two sets will be treated, because perceived unfairness between step-siblings is the most common fracture in these households.

Finally, the paperwork. A previous marriage must be properly ended before a new one, both religiously and in law — a divorce certificate or a death certificate will be needed for the marriage licence and for any immigration application. Our nikah nama guide applies with extra force in a second marriage: record the haq mehr, and consider the written agreement described above, particularly where there are children from before and property to protect for them.

One valley, and a border half an hour away

Treat the whole Lower Mainland as a single market, because it is one continuous urban region and people move across it constantly. Vancouver proper is forty minutes north-west without traffic and rather more with it, and Burnaby, Richmond, Coquitlam and New Westminster sit between. Eastward, Delta, Langley and Abbotsford continue the same community out into the Fraser Valley. Open all of it from the first day; the Pakistani community in any one of these municipalities is small, and together it is a reasonable pool.

Beyond British Columbia, the honest distances. Calgary is ten hours by road through the mountains or ninety minutes by air, and Edmonton about the same; the mountain highways in winter are not a casual drive and families should fly. The Greater Toronto Area — Toronto, Mississauga and Brampton — is five hours by air and three time zones away, which makes even the telephone calls awkward, but it holds most of the Pakistani families in the country and a steady number of matches run that route.

And then the border, which is closer than anything else. The crossings at Douglas and Pacific Highway are twenty to thirty minutes from Newton, and Seattle is two hours beyond them with a substantial Pakistani community of its own. Cross-border matches between the Lower Mainland and Washington are common and perfectly workable. Understand only that they put an immigration process in the middle of the marriage whichever way it runs, and that a Canadian permanent resident who moves south puts that status at risk, as our Canada page explains. For Pakistan itself, Vancouver airport offers one-stop service through the Gulf, and a great many families here route through Toronto instead.