By Roland Maconda · Published on · 3 min read · Preparing your file
A refusal is rarely a surprise to anyone who read the file before it was submitted. In most cases the cause was visible, and avoidable. Here are the five we meet most often.
1. Statements that do not agree with each other
An employment date that differs by a few months between two documents. A job title that changes from one attestation to the next. An address that does not match the one on another form.
These gaps look trivial to the person making them, because they know the truth behind them. The officer reviewing the file does not: they see two incompatible statements, and draw the consequences.
What to do: read the whole file as though you did not know the person. Every date, every title, every address must be identical throughout.
2. Real experience that cannot be documented
This is the most unjust cause. Years of actual work, for private individuals, with no written contract, no payslip, no attestation. The experience exists; it simply cannot be demonstrated.
Administratively, undocumented experience is experience that does not exist.
What to do: start documenting now, before even considering a departure. Attestations signed by employers with their contact details, proof of payment, anything dated and verifiable. This is prepared months ahead.
3. A job title that does not match the actual duties
Presenting yourself as a care assistant when the duties performed belong to home support — or the reverse — weakens the whole file. Not because one is worth more than the other, but because the occupational category declared must match what you actually did.
What to do: describe the actual duties, precisely, and let the occupational category follow from them.
4. An incomplete file submitted anyway
Out of impatience, or because one document is slow to arrive, people file intending to complete it later. An incomplete file is assessed as it stands.
What to do: wait. A few weeks' delay costs less than a refusal, which costs the fees paid, the full timeline, and sometimes more.
5. An inaccurate statement
Experience stretched, a qualification embellished, a fact left out. The temptation is understandable when a file looks marginal; it is wildly disproportionate to the gain hoped for.
The consequences go far beyond the refusal of the current application. Under Canadian immigration law, misrepresentation — giving false information, or withholding a material fact — carries a bar on entry lasting several years, during which no new application can succeed. The finding follows the person, not the file.
Put plainly: the hoped-for gain concerns one application, the risk concerns every application that follows. It is the worst trade in the sector, and yet the one a dishonest intermediary offers most readily — because they are not the one who will bear the consequences.
What to do: never compromise on this. A regulated consultant cannot produce a statement they know to be inaccurate, and must end the representation if asked to. That is our position.
In short
Four of these five mistakes are fixed in advance, with time and method. The fifth is not fixed: it is refused.
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