Interested in finding out about the laws in Canada if you are a mail order bride, Internet bride, or part of an arranged marriage? Well a Canadian website has been set up just for that purpose.
* Thinking of marrying and moving to Canada
* In the process of having an arranged marriage with someone in Canada
* Going to marry someone whom you met through a matchmaking agency
* Coming to Canada as a mail order bride
* Interested in finding out about the laws in Canada as they relate to mail order brides, Internet brides, or brides of arranged marriages
* Married to a Canadian and waiting for or wanting to know about sponsorship
* Unhappy or do not feel safe in your marriage to a Canadian and wondering what you can do
This site is for you.
It is called Canadian Law and Modern Day Foreign Brides and it is a site to help Internet, mail order brides to answer questions and make the transition to an unknown place a little less frightening.
The Web site is funded by the Alberta Law Foundation and managed by the Legal Resource Center.
People that work with immigrant women say that they are seeing more and more brides going to Canada after having met their soon to be spouses in a chat room or on the Internet or even by mail order and they say that many of these women do not understand their legal rights within a marriage and they have created a website to help them.
San San Sy, of Changing Together, a center for immigrant woman in Edmonton, Alberta, helped create this website because they were seeing many women come to them to ask for help, she continues by saying, "Sometimes the bride comes not knowing that she will be the live-in nanny to take care of aging parents."
The purpose for setting up the site, found here, is to help make this information available before the brides travel into the unknown.
Sy also adds that some women are sent photos of the home they will be living in and when they get there they find that the home is in the middle of nowhere, a small town and Sy provides an example:
For example, Sy said the number of mail-order brides is increasing in Fort McMurray, the booming northern Alberta town of 64,441 that is the center of Canada's huge oil sands industry -- where men easily outnumber women.
"A lot of them are very scared," Sy said, adding many women just want to blend in and don't want to "lose face" back home.
The website is set up with categories that answer all sorts of questions.
The "before getting married" category covers the topics of, International dating and matchmaking agencies, International arranged marriages, questions to ask, Marital status, your future husbands expectations, Location of your ceremony and visiting your future husband before marriage.
They provide information about "Coming to Canada", which includes information on a visitor visa, and sponsorship.
The "Marriage breakdown" covers the topics of separation, divorce, finances and such.
According to the original article, in 2006, approximately 45,000 women went to Canada to become spouses, but they have no breakdown of how many found their soon to be spouses over the Internet or how many were arranged marriages.
The creation of this website gives women that are frightened and unsure of what they are about to do, a place to get the relevant information to make that final determination.
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