Juno News - March 08, 2020


More evidence of Canada’s weak border policy

Mentioned
Sonny Wang Wu Lian Li Oolean Lee
Let the cops do their jobs The Candice Malcolm Show： Trudeau isn't too worried about the coronavirus

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

142.97

Word count

694

Sentence count

38


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In case you needed more evidence that Canada is weak on border policy, I ve got a story to tell you today about a 54-year-old resident of Port Coquitlam, BC who was set to be deported from Canada for having falsified her permanent residency application.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.320 Just in case you needed more evidence that Canada is weak on border policy, I've got
00:00:10.000 a story to tell you today.
00:00:11.640 Oolean Lee, a 54-year-old resident of Port Coquitlam, BC, was set to be deported from
00:00:17.680 Canada for having falsified her permanent residency application.
00:00:22.360 The Canadian Border Services Agency, the CBSA, discovered Lee's husband had lied about his
00:00:28.400 employment status and residence in Canada, and that Lee had lied about her travel history
00:00:33.580 and dates of residence in Canada.
00:00:36.040 Lee first came to this country in 2005, but left after a month, then came back in 2007,
00:00:43.060 and not before long, again went back to China.
00:00:45.880 She came back in 2013, and at that point in 2013, she apparently, according to this article,
00:00:51.960 began collecting a pension.
00:00:53.760 Now, if she is 54 in 2020, that would have made her 47 years old in 2013, and I'm not
00:01:00.300 sure 47-year-olds can collect pensions, correct me if I'm wrong.
00:01:04.800 So I think something has gone awry here.
00:01:07.360 But aside from that, clearly, Lee and her husband had not spent enough time in Canada to qualify
00:01:12.820 for permanent residency.
00:01:14.600 So they decided to purchase fraudulent documents from NUCAN Consultants Limited.
00:01:20.760 Now, let me tell you a bit about NUCAN Consultants.
00:01:23.960 Sonny Wang was the man behind this immigration consulting company.
00:01:28.760 And Sonny Wang, with this company, ran the biggest immigration scam in Canadian history.
00:01:35.160 Wang advertised his consulting services in Chinese-language newspapers.
00:01:40.120 The service he offered was falsifying documents for wealthy Chinese nationals who wanted permanent
00:01:45.800 residency in Canada, but hadn't spent enough time here to qualify, so they buy fake documents.
00:01:52.040 Wang and his company, NUCAN, which had over a dozen employees, affixed fake stamps to client
00:01:58.760 passports, falsely inflated the time spent in Canada on applications, provided falsified addresses
00:02:05.720 and phone numbers, and provided fake proof of employment with Wang's various shell companies.
00:02:11.800 Wang made over $10 million from 1,200 clients before he was caught in 2014.
00:02:18.920 CBSA officials became suspicious that over 100 people were claiming to live at the same
00:02:25.400 single-family dwelling in Richmond, BC, because Wang would use the same couple of addresses on
00:02:30.280 the falsified documents.
00:02:31.560 So officials raided Wang's house, and he was actually caught red-handed with photocopied
00:02:36.840 Chinese passports in his hands. Wang received a seven-year prison sentence in October 2014,
00:02:43.480 as he pleaded guilty to illegal immigration consulting, fraud, and tax evasion. Because,
00:02:49.160 oh yeah, he had also failed to report $2.7 million of income between 2007 and 2012, resulting in the
00:02:57.960 evasion of about $730,000 in income tax. So aside from his prison sentence of seven years,
00:03:06.040 he also had to pay two fines. The money he owed the CRA, the $730,000 for tax evasion,
00:03:12.520 and about $188,000 for defrauding the federal government. So in total, he had to pay about $920,000.
00:03:20.840 But in 2018, he was released from prison early on parole, even though he had not paid his $920,000 fine.
00:03:29.800 So back to Wu Lian Li, the 54-year-old woman from Port Coquitlam who used the services of Sunny Wang.
00:03:38.040 Her deportation order has been halted as the Immigration Appeals Division found that there were
00:03:43.400 compassionate and humanitarian reasons to keep Li in the country. So what are those grounds? Well,
00:03:49.480 firstly, she apologized. She said sorry. And secondly, she is a grandma now who provides free housework for
00:03:57.800 her son and his wife. And her son and his wife would have a really hard time if they didn't have
00:04:04.040 her around. Yes, that is the reason. Now, I'm all for keeping families intact, but let's see this for
00:04:11.080 what it is. You can lie to Canadian border officials, defraud our immigration system, undermine our
00:04:17.080 immigration system, and apparently collect benefits and a pension despite only living in this country for
00:04:23.240 a couple of months. So look, all I can say is that so far, it's been a good deal for Li. And for the
00:04:29.320 rest of us, well, we've got one more example of Canadian border policy being pretty much a total joke.
00:04:35.400 I'm Lindsay Shepard, investigative journalism fellow with True North.
00:04:39.160 Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in next week's video.