Comments on: An affaire and liaison with Canadian visa counter

by: Su, Toronto,Ontario

Wed, 31 May 2006 18:32:40 +0000

I agree. Some of the visa officers at the Canadian Embassy in colombo make their decisions without showing the proper sources of evidence that they used to base their decisons.

by: Ajith Dharma

Wed, 31 May 2006 08:31:27 +0000

Hi Siva, I am sorry actually what happened to you. I hope you are not implicating workers in the Canadian Embassy are Sinhalese and they deliberately did that. I invited my Brother and Mother to UK once and my brother did not get the visa. He blamed it squarely on Tamil interpreter and a Tamil visa support officers in UK embassy (he did not ask interpreter but my mother asked one since she had diffculty understanding visa officer) . Many of my Sinhalese friends blame Tamil workers in embassies for rejected Visas. May be some truth in it but not always. It is a known fact that most Local staff in these emabassies are either Tamil, Burgher or Muslim. There are very very few Sinhalese (I think it is either for command of English language or westerners perhaps want to give minorities more chance).
By the way the point is Visa officers have their allocations of granting visas and rejecting visas. Not so long ago they have arrested a western visa officer in Colombo for selling his allocation to a travel agency. He was rejecting outright any application submitted to him and he was caught. So it can be any of these reasons. I hope this officer will see the light next time.
Ajith

by: Victor

Wed, 31 May 2006 08:00:16 +0000

First of all I agree that there could be some foul play by the local staff, however I would like to point out my personal experience in this regard.

I am a Srilankan born Canadian citizen and a practicing physician. I migrated to Canada in early 90s. In late 80s, I applied to two universities (university of Ottawa and University of Toronto) to do elective medical rotation and was granted for one month each. During this time all the universities were closed in Srilanka due to JVP insurgency.

I have two outstanding individuals sponsored me in each locations and I submitted my application duly to the Canadian High Commission in Colombo. I had all the necessary documents, air tickets, letter from the vice chancellor, dean and sponsors. Yet, the officer name Robert Orr, who was known to reject all the visa applications told me after the interview that “After a careful consideration, my application was rejected” without giving a valid reason.

One of my sponsors was an influential individual in Ottawa and he spoke to then Foreign Sec. Joe Clark and the answer was, it was a local decision and they won’t interfere unless on a humanitarian basis.

Latter I came on a family re-union class (the officer who interviewed during this time was apologetic for the previous incident). This tells me one thing, there are some Canadian officers who are racist mind set (only few of them as many of them are good hearted) who can decide and has the power to decide who can and who cannot come to Canada as a visitor.