In the Halifax house of Victoria Joumaa, there are furnished rooms with individual beds: soccer balls in the night tables in a room, a pink owl and a stuffed teddy in the other, with clothes in both cabinets, all for children who do not live there.
“We just want to take our children home,” Joumaa said, cleaning tears. “That’s all. That’s all we want.”
Children are Jaumaa biological cousins. She says that Anthony Makhlouf, 13, and her brothers, Charbel, 12, and Theresa, 6, have suffered negligence and abuse most of their lives because their parents fight with mental health and addiction problems. They have also lived through war.
Joumaa is already his legal guardian, but during the last five years, motivated by the explosion of 2020 who killed more than 200 people in Beirut, has been trying to adopt them and take them to Canada.
Now, he says, time is being exhausted: children will be forced to leave their orphanage at the end of June.
Both biological parents voluntarily signed on their rights to Joumaa in December 2020, and Lebanese legal documents show that the ruling also allows children to leave the country without their biological parents.
Joumaa, 28, has tried several ways to bring children to Canada, even through the adoption of the exchange and temporarily, in visitors’ visas. In the last case, it was rejected three times because the federal government does not believe that children ever leave Canada.
She acknowledges that she made some paperwork mistakes before involving a lawyer.
At one point, he communicated with his member of Parliament, Lena Metlege Diab, who is now the Minister of Immigration, refugees and citizenship of Canada, and member of the Lebanese community of Halifax. The minister’s office said he could not help.
“It is in fact and legally false that the minister cannot avoid,” said Chantal Deslages, Joumaa immigration lawyer.
A spokesman said that the minister was not available for an interview and that due to privacy legislation he could not comment on specific cases.
Joumaa has provided extensive documentation to CBC News, demonstrating its guardianship and showing the various processes that you have tried in Canada, including the corresponding rejection letters of the Canadian government.
In April of this year, both biological parents also wrote letters to support the most recent application of Joumaa to bring the children to Canada.
“This is not a deserving life for them,” says mother
“I want Anthony, Charbel and Theresa to abandon Lebanon, since this is not a deserving life for them, I know they will be treated, loved, supported and presented with a love -loving family with Victoria and her spouse, Jaya, in Canada,” wrote the mother of the children, Ibtissam Moham Al Mohamad.
He pointed out that he has not worried about children since 2018.
The girl, Theresa, has been staying with family members, but Joumaa says that the conditions are less ideal, in a narrow department. Children have stayed in an orphan center and disadvantaged children, but its director says they cannot accommodate adolescents. Anthony and Charbel will not be able to return to the orphanage after they leave for summer at the end of June.
“I am very sad and I am also very worried,” said Sister Rachidé Maalouli, director of the Saint Charbel Center, in a French interview about WhatsApp.
“We are going to have children of the street; it is terrible.”
Joumaa says they told him that he cannot adopt children in Lebanon because children can only be adopted there if both parents die and because the country does not recognize same -sex relationships.
Joumaa has been with his partner, Jaya Meier, for two and a half years.
“I always wanted a family and victory is my person, and she is my forever. So I love these children as much as she,” said Meier, who is learning Arabic.
Both are employed, direct a business aside and have savings.
Canadian law dated, says immigration lawyer
Deslages said it would have been easier to take children to Canada if they had already been adopted, but she says that there are many reasons why children cannot be adopted in several countries and that the Canadian law is dated. Improvements should be made for these types of cases, he said.
She said: If they can get here, children can be legally adopted in Canada after spending time.
Joumaa, who emigrated to Canada when he was six years old, said he thought he could transmit his citizenship to the children, but learned that he cannot because he received his own citizenship from his father.
In a rejection letter dated February 2023, a citizenship officer said that since 2009, citizens have generally been limited to the first generation born outside Canada. This means that a child born outside Canada and adopted by a Canadian father is only eligible for a citizenship subsidy if the adoptive father was born in Canada or if the adoptive father became a citizen by immigrating to Canada and having the citizen granted formally, instead of transmitting him from a father, as Jouma did.
Joumaa says he has always maintained strong ties with Lebanon, visiting at least once a year, sometimes for months at the same time, before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
After the last visit in 2019, he said that the children squeezed in their legs at the airport, crying and begging him not to leave.
Deslages said there is no time to submit a humanitarian application for permanent residence because that could take years.
Deslges requested another visitor visa, but this time with an attached temporary resident permit. Canada issues these in exceptional circumstances for inadmissible or not eligible people to enter the country in other ways: for example, a person who was fired while he was in a work permit, or an American business person with an old disability driving record that needs to come to Canada for a meeting.
That request was also denied on June 5. Deslages said there seems to be an error by which the officer denied the visa visa and did not even approach the exceptional addition. She is requesting a judicial review.
Joumaa signed consent forms that give immigration, refugees and citizenship permission of Canada (IRCC) to share information with CBC News.
In a statement, a spokesman said that the visitor visa was rejected again because the officer was not satisfied for the children to leave Canada at the end of the period authorized for their stay. IRCC “does not have additional information to share at this time regarding the consideration of the temporal permits of the residents,” said the spokesman.
The last request was supported by 14 letters from Joumaa and the family and friends of Meier in Canada and Lebanon, and those of Lebanon reiterated the unstable situation there.
“Victoria has my full support in this,” wrote Joumaa, Rita Makhlouf, who lives in Halifax and is the biological aunt of children. “I will be there as Anthony, Charbel and The Grandma of Theresa and as Victoria’s mother. Supporting them in any way that is necessary or desired.”
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