As the 2016 World Social Forum gets underway in Montreal today, it is likely that many would-be delegates and invitees will not be in attendance. Many applications for Temporary Residents Visas (TRVs), also known as visitor visas, were rejected by the government of Canada, or were not processed in time for the event.
The World Social Forum, an annual meeting bringing together activists and leftist intellectuals from around the world, runs from August 9 to August 14.The gathering, which was first introduced in 2001, serves as an annual counterweight to the World Economic Forum, held in Davos, Switzerland. The Montreal WSF event is expected to draw 50,000 people and 5,000 organizations and is aimed at finding “concrete alternatives to the neoliberal economic model and to policies based on the exploitation of human beings and nature,” according to its website.
The visa issue may now contribute to the Montreal WSF event being the least-attended in the conference’s 15-year history.
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC, formerly CIC) has blamed the visa denials on WSF’s organization and says the applications were not filled out rigorously, adding that organizers should have sought private assistance to complete the applications.
For its part, the WSF website states that “many visa denials stem from technical issues (complexity of forms, procedural timeframes, inaccessibility of embassy services).”
As the most common reasons for refusal vary among the many Canadian visa offices globally, a menu of reasons has been developed and each visa office is able to customize the standard letter by inserting the most commonly used refusal reasons at that visa office.
In reaching a decision, a visa officer considers several factors. These may include the applicant’s travel and identity documents, reason for travel to Canada, contacts in Canada, financial means for the trip, ties to the country of residence (including immigration status, employment and family ties), and whether the applicant would be likely to leave Canada at the end of his or her authorized stay.
