Negotiating a Child's Custody Consent for a Move to Midland

The situation

Andre works as a plumber in Midland, running a small residential service business he built over a decade. Two years ago he met Donovan, an elementary school teacher living and working in the Philippines, through a mutual friend during a visit home. The relationship became serious, and Andre began the process of sponsoring Donovan to come live with him permanently in Canada under the spousal sponsorship stream, which allows a Canadian citizen or permanent resident to sponsor a spouse or common-law partner for permanent residence.

Donovan had a nine-year-old child from a previous relationship with Kasia, who also lived in the Philippines and remained closely involved in the child's life. Donovan and Kasia had never formalized custody through a court. They simply split time with the child by informal agreement, the way many separated parents do when the relationship ends without conflict. That informality, which had worked fine for years, became the single biggest obstacle to the sponsorship application once the child was added as an accompanying dependant.

Andre and Donovan came to us once the sponsorship application was already partly assembled, hoping to add the finishing touches and submit within weeks. Andre had done some of his own reading online and understood, in general terms, that a spouse and any dependent children usually move through the process together. What neither of them had worked through yet was what that meant in practice for a child whose other parent was still very much part of the picture, living on the other side of the world, and had not yet been asked how she felt about any of it.

The legal problem

When a spouse or partner is sponsored to Canada and has a dependent child who will move with them, that child must be declared and processed as part of the same application, even if the child is not the sponsor's biological or legal child. Immigration officers reviewing these applications look closely at the family details section, because a child relocating internationally with only one parent raises an obvious question: does the other parent know, and do they agree?

Without a court custody order granting Donovan sole decision-making authority, the standard way to satisfy an officer is a written consent letter from the other parent, Kasia, confirming agreement to the child's permanent relocation, along with a copy of Kasia's identification. Missing or inadequate consent documentation is one of the most common reasons these applications are delayed with a request for further evidence, and in more serious cases it can raise concerns about a parent attempting to remove a child without the other parent's knowledge, which officers are trained to watch for.

Donovan raised the issue with Kasia only after the application was already underway, assuming it would be a formality. It was not. Kasia had supported the relationship with Andre in the abstract, but the reality of the child living across the world, with contact reduced to video calls and occasional visits, was different from anything they had discussed. Kasia refused to sign the consent letter as drafted, and the application stalled.

This is a more common problem than most families expect. Blended families and separated parents are the norm, not the exception, and immigration applications are not built around the assumption that every parent in a child's life will be equally enthusiastic about that child moving abroad. The process does not ask whether the other parent agrees with the decision in principle. It asks for proof, in a specific and reviewable form, that the other parent consents to the specific act of permanent relocation. Goodwill between former partners does not substitute for that proof, and neither does an assumption that the other parent will simply go along with it once asked.

What we did

1. Reviewed the family composition early in the file. Before the application went any further, we confirmed the child would be included as an accompanying dependant and flagged that a custody order or a proper consent letter from Kasia would be required, rather than letting the couple discover this gap after submission.
2. Explained what the consent letter needed to say. A vague statement of goodwill is not enough. It needed to identify the child, confirm Kasia's parental status, state clear and unconditional consent to the child's permanent relocation to Canada, and be signed, dated, and accompanied by Kasia's identification. We also advised that it should be notarized and, since it would be produced in the Philippines, properly translated and certified if not drafted in English.
3. Separated the immigration requirement from the parenting decision. Kasia's hesitation was not really about paperwork. It was about losing meaningful contact with the child. We were careful not to draft language that pressured Kasia into signing something that misrepresented what she was agreeing to. Instead, we advised Donovan and Andre that the fastest realistic path was a genuine agreement Kasia could actually accept, not a document extracted under time pressure.
4. Helped structure a written parenting agreement alongside the consent letter. Donovan and Kasia, with input from us on what would satisfy the immigration requirement, put together a private agreement covering a regular video-call schedule, and extended in-person visits back to the Philippines during school breaks, with travel costs shared between Donovan and Andre. This was not a court order, but a clear written commitment that gave Kasia something concrete rather than a vague promise.
5. Reviewed the final consent letter and agreement before submission. We checked that the notarization, translation, and certification met the standard immigration expects, and that the consent letter itself remained clean and unconditional even though it existed alongside the separate parenting agreement.
6. Reset the family's timeline expectations. The renegotiation added several months to a process that already runs on the order of many months once fully submitted. We advised Andre and Donovan early that rushing a weak consent letter through would likely trigger a further document request and cost more time than negotiating a real agreement upfront.

The outcome

Kasia eventually signed the consent letter once the parenting agreement was finalized alongside it. The agreement itself has no formal legal force the way a court custody order would, but it gave Kasia a documented, mutually agreed structure for staying involved in the child's life, which was what made signing possible. The couple's total out-of-pocket cost for notarization, certified translation, and courier fees to get the documents properly executed in the Philippines came to roughly $800.

The application, including the child as an accompanying dependant, was ultimately submitted with a complete and properly executed consent letter. It moved forward without a further document request on this point, which is itself a meaningful win, since a request of that kind often adds months on top of an already long processing timeline. But the family did not get an easy or fast outcome. The renegotiation with Kasia added close to four months before the application was even ready to submit, time the couple had not budgeted for.

Andre and Donovan also had to accept a real, ongoing obligation: the travel and video-call commitments in the parenting agreement are not going away once the child arrives in Midland. On a dual-income household budget built around Andre's plumbing business and Donovan's eventual teaching work in Ontario, funding return trips to the Philippines during school breaks is a recurring cost they planned for going forward, not a one-time expense. It was a compromise both sides could live with, not the clean, fast outcome the couple had initially hoped for when they started the application.

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