Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves has welcomed the announcement of visa-free travel for Vincentians to Canada. However, he says it is not the whole hog, metaphorically speaking.
Gonsalves said the visa restrictions were imposed in September 2012 on what he considers spurious grounds, and he made that plain to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper in letters and personally.
“I have been lobbying my friend PM Justin Trudeau repeatedly and while in the Bahamas. The arrangement is likely to be in two phases; we have now reached a point of what you may call the first phase, which is what the Canadian officials said to me; this is not the end point”.
Visa-free travel affects two categories of Vincentian passport holders. One, those who had a Canadian visa over the past ten years and current holders of US visas
“One, those who had a Canadian visa over the past ten years but, for some reason or another, hadn’t had it renewed. Naturally, the current visa holders will go in the normal way. They can just go online in the manner prescribed in the information announced yesterday by the Minister of Immigration from Canada, and they will do what is called an ETA. So you go online, you put in the details, and you get a five-year entry.”
“The second category would be those persons who have valid non-immigrant visas recalled visitor’s visas to America. They would use that as the base for you to get the electronic travel authorization, so those are two categories in addition to the current visa holders, but you can only enter by air”.
“I welcome it because it’s an advance, but it’s not yet the whole hog, metaphorically speaking. So some progress has been made, and a lot of lobbying has been done. We are in a better position now than we would otherwise have been”, Gonsalves said.
