The Consent Letter That Almost Kept a Mother and Daughter Apart

The situation

Natalia had spent two years building a relationship long distance before deciding to move to Canada. Her partner lived in Parry Sound, and once their relationship reached the point where sponsorship became possible, they began the paperwork for Natalia to immigrate as his spouse. Natalia worked as a rideshare driver back home, a flexible job that let her manage the school pickups and appointments that came with raising her eight-year-old daughter, Amalia, mostly on her own. She assumed Amalia would simply be added to the application as her dependent child and the two of them would move together once it was approved. It was not that simple.

Natalia came to Treadstone Law looking for help with the spousal side of the file: proving the relationship was genuine, gathering the financial documents her partner needed as sponsor, and making sense of the forms. Amalia's part of the application seemed, to Natalia, like the easy piece. A birth certificate, a photo, a signature on the form naming her as a dependant. It was only once we asked a routine question, whether Amalia's father was still involved in her life, that the real shape of the problem came into view.

The custody problem

Amalia's father, Paulo, worked as a security guard and lived about an hour away from Natalia. He and Natalia had never married, and had separated when Amalia was a toddler, but under the arrangement they had followed for years, both parents held joint decision-making responsibility for Amalia even though she lived primarily with Natalia. Neither of them had ever put that arrangement into a court order. It had simply worked, by agreement, for six years.

That informal history became a serious problem the moment Natalia tried to include Amalia in her sponsorship application. Canadian immigration officials will not take one parent's word that a child is free to relocate permanently. When a minor is immigrating with one parent and the other parent is still living and has not given up their legal rights, the application needs to show either the non-accompanying parent's written consent to the child's relocation, or a custody order confirming the accompanying parent has sole authority to make that decision on her own. Without one of those two things, an officer can hold Amalia's part of the file indefinitely, no matter how strong the rest of the application is.

Natalia had not raised the subject with Paulo before starting the paperwork. When she did, he refused. Not because he wanted to stop Amalia from having a better life, he told her, but because he had watched other men lose contact with their children after an ocean came between them, and he did not trust that a signature on a form would not be the last thing anyone ever asked of him.

Natalia's first instinct was that Paulo's consent should not really be necessary. She had been the one raising Amalia day to day for years, paying for school supplies and doctor's visits out of what she earned driving, while Paulo's involvement had thinned to occasional weekends. It felt unfair, in a practical sense, that his signature could hold up a move that would plainly benefit their daughter. We explained that fairness in that everyday sense and legal custody are not the same question. Joint decision-making rights do not expire because one parent has done more of the daily work. They expire when a court order says they do, or when the parent who holds them agrees to let them go.

What we did

1. Confirmed what the application actually required. We reviewed Natalia and Paulo's custody history and explained that because Paulo held joint decision-making rights he had never surrendered, his written consent was a required part of Amalia's file, not a courtesy Natalia could choose to skip.
2. Ruled out shortcuts early. Natalia asked whether she could seek sole custody through a home-country court instead of asking Paulo directly, to avoid the conversation altogether. We advised against it. A contested custody proceeding would likely take longer than a negotiated consent, cost more, and could still end with a shared arrangement that changed nothing about what she needed.
3. Helped shape a consent that addressed his real fear. Once it became clear Paulo's real concern was losing contact rather than losing a say, we worked with Natalia to draft a written access arrangement to sit alongside the consent letter: a defined schedule of video calls and a promised return visit each summer, so the letter he was being asked to sign did not read as a door closing on his end.
4. Prepared the consent letter to the standard immigration officials expect. A consent letter needs to say specific things: that the parent understands the child is relocating permanently, agrees to it, and is not signing under pressure. It typically needs to be signed in front of a notary and translated if it is not already in English. We prepared the document and coordinated the notarization so it could not later be challenged as incomplete.
5. Set expectations on timing. We told Natalia plainly that even a cooperative resolution would likely add a couple of months to the file, between the negotiation itself and the notarization and translation steps that had to follow it. Rushing the conversation with Paulo to save time risked the opposite result.

The outcome

Paulo eventually signed. He did not do it quickly, and he did not do it for free in any emotional sense. The access arrangement he and Natalia settled on, with defined video calls and a promised visit every summer, was the price of his consent, and it is now something Natalia is bound to honour going forward, not just something she offered in good faith to get the paperwork moving. We were careful to tell her the arrangement had no formal legal force in Canada. It was not a custody order, and a Canadian court could not enforce it directly if circumstances changed later. What it was, was a workable agreement that got Paulo's signature onto the one document that mattered most in the short term: the consent letter immigration officials needed to see.

Amalia's part of the sponsorship moved forward roughly two months after the rest of Natalia's file, once the consent letter, its notarization and its translation were all in place. The family's overall timeline stretched by about that same amount of time compared with what a straightforward spousal sponsorship might otherwise have taken, and their modest single income household felt every extra month of it, between the cost of a certified translator and the wait itself. Natalia and Amalia are now settled in Parry Sound. Paulo has kept up his end of the video calls so far, and the first summer visit is still ahead of them.

Nobody involved got everything they wanted. Natalia had hoped to avoid negotiating with Paulo at all; Paulo had hoped, at least at first, to say no. What they arrived at instead was an arrangement that let Amalia move, gave Paulo a real reason to trust the process, and kept the whole matter out of a courtroom. It is not the clean, uncomplicated outcome either of them pictured at the start, but it is one that held up long enough to get Amalia on a plane, and it is still holding.

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