Thank you Emily and Nicky for posting about this today. Here's the scoop:
In Canada, once you receive the referral to your child, you are then assigned a court date where the adoption is given final approval (or not, in the case where the birth family decides not to go through with the adoption). Following the court date, there are additional medical reports passed back and forth between countries, and the visa is processed.
Right now, Canadian families are traveling approximately 4-6 months after the court date. It seems that in the US, the wait is 1-4 weeks. There are many other discrepancies between country times lines, but this is the one we are focusing on here. The main reason for the discrepancy appears to be a lack of Canadian government manpower.
Members of the Yahoo Canada adoption group composed the following letter. I just emailed the minister and my MP, Mr. Hangar. I added my personal 2-bits to my letter, but you don't have to. The letter is well written, as is.
PLEASE, WHETHER YOU ARE PART OF THE ADOPTION COMMUNITY OR NOT, take a few minutes to copy and paste this letter into an email and send it to The Hon. Diane Finley, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration (CIC). Her email address: Minister@cic.gc.ca.
And CC it to your local MP. You can find your MP's email address simply by entering your postal code here:
http://www2.parl.gc.ca/Parlinfo/Compilations/HouseOfCommons/MemberByPostalCode.aspx?Menu=HOC
These letter campaigns to Minster Finley really do make a difference - the recent changes to Bill C-14 are a perfect example. The bottom line is that expediting the process, especially after the adoption has been approved, is in the best interest of the children. Read on.
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Dear Minister Finley,
I am writing to express my concern about the time it is taking for Ethiopian children adopted to Canadian families to obtain a Permanent Resident Visa or Citizenship paperwork. It appears, after much research, that the reason why children that are legally adopted by parents in Canada are not coming home is simply because there isn't enough human-power at the High Commission in Nairobi to process their visas or citizenship papers. Shortening this time period does NOT in any way compromise the ethical investigation that goes into each child referral. This investigation (2-3 months) is what takes place before the court date that determines whether the child can be adopted. This time frame is acceptable, the possible six months afterwards is not.
Recently, with China beginning to make it extremely difficult to be able to adopt, many families are now turning to Ethiopia. As a result there is a backlog that reaches up to 6 months after court date, for a child to come home. Children are staying in institutions when they have parents at home in Canada that simply are not allowed to go and pick them up because of immigration. No other country takes up to six months to process the adoptions of Ethiopian children. The United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Ireland, Finland and Spain all process adoption visas within 1-4 weeks of the Ethiopian court date, not 4-8 months. I won't even begin to get into the long-term effects on the children that do not begin attachment in the early months of their lives. Lastly, Ethiopian adoptions are on the rise and many adoption agencies do not see it slowing down in the near future. Let's not wait until next year to realize that we needed to hire more people. Let's be proactive and start now. Please make this a part of your "priority" that you have already promised as a government to adopted children abroad.
We strongly urge the CIC to employ additional staff to process the immigration paperwork for adopted children at the High Commission in Nairobi. The CIC must support the health of these orphaned children by getting them home in weeks, not months, after the court decisions.
Sincerely,
