If you have 15 seconds and you’re looking for a laugh, then have I got a recommendation for you. Go watch the Government of Canada’s new public service announcement.
The scene opens to reveal a plastic heterosexual couple atop a white, frosted wedding cake. The camera spins gracefully around the couple as Mendelssohn’s Wedding March plays in the background. “Many Canadians marry people from other countries,” a man’s voice informs us, as bored as if he’s reading from a “Facts About Canada” cue card.
Then, without warning, his voice turns harsh and urgent: “But sometimes marriage is a scam to jump the immigration line.” Zounds, the shocking twist! Don’t be a victim of marriage fraud, we’re warned. End scene.
From the sepulchral authoritarianism of the narrator’s voice to the friendly little jingle that closes the ad (and that Government of Canada logo that pops up all pleasant-like, as though they weren’t trying to scare the garters off us a moment ago), the brief ad is so intense that it plays like a parody of PSAs.
Alas, it’s sincere.
Immigration Minister Jason Kenney’s crackdown on marriage fraud has been going on since October 2012, but the latest PSAs came out in March, which has been dubbed Fraud Prevention Month. I saw it on the plane back to Canada, laughed at it, then forgot about it.
It came back to me only when I read Jack Knox’s column last Friday: “Duncan woman, 27, faces deportation after clerical error.” The woman in question, Janilee Cadongonan, was born in the Philippines and is a permanent resident of Canada. She had hoped to marry and sponsor her boyfriend so he could live here as her husband. Some time during the process, she filled out the wrong form. She insists it was a mistake, while the Immigration and Refugee Board believes she did it intentionally.
Or maybe they don’t. To hear their justification (“The need to maintain the integrity of the immigration system far outweighs any dislocation caused to the appellant, or her family, by the appellant’s removal from Canada”) the IRB sounds less interested in determining her guilt (though I guess they don’t have to — the mistake was made) than establishing a zero-tolerance precedent on “marriage fraud,” regardless of whose lives are affected.
Suddenly, that PSA doesn’t seem so funny anymore.
This situation drives home to me how important the language we use is, and how it shapes our world. The phrase “marriage fraud” conjures up a very specific image. Obviously, marriage fraud exists, but these cases are complicated and individual; the majority do not comply with our popular image of beautiful, dangerous women preying upon lonely, decent, hard-working Canadian men.
The sense of exploitation that this popular rendering of “marriage fraud” evokes raises our hackles, and the ad picks up on this. The female cake-topper vanishes into thin air, symbolic of her falseness — or perhaps of the consequences of deportation. A wedding bell chimes dolefully, lamenting the lonely man’s fate. Be afraid.
And we are. We’re afraid of exploitation. We’re afraid of them (whoever they are) coming here and unfairly benefiting from our tax dollars at work, unjustly consuming our resources. (As though North America’s consumption of over a quarter of the world’s resources while hosting less than five per cent of its population isn’t cosmically unfair.)
Fraud Prevention Month is capitalizing on this fear, and that’s what permits us to rationalize Cadongonan’s impending deportation from her home of six and a half years. I’m blown away when I hear the voices of the lucky take refuge in bureaucratic piousness, as though the phrase “Well, those are the rules” protects us from any responsibility to the individual.
It is the accident of birth that allows us to identify as natural-born Canadians, not merit, and we should never allow ourselves to pretend otherwise.
Maybe this woman fudged a rule to get the life she wanted for her boyfriend. Or maybe she filled out the wrong form in a complicated clerical procedure.
I can barely file my taxes.
That PSA made me laugh because it seemed absurd, and it seemed absurd because it wasn’t dangerous to me or my family. Janilee Cadongonan, who’s about my age and lives on my Island, doesn’t have that comfort. I don’t know her, but I don’t think she’d laugh if she saw it.
