About Gambling for Grandma
The title of this project, Gambling for Grandma, signals the risk and chance involved in organizing immigration and/or care for foreign older older parents and grandparents.
Instituted in late 2016, Canada uses a lottery system to determine which few families are permitted to apply to sponsor parents or grandparents in Canada’s family reunification immigration program. Income/wealth is central to eligibility criteria for sponsorship and processing times for applications are long, usually spanning several years. Caring for a parent at a distance can be equally if not more fraught for children.
Gambling for Grandma works towards a comparative policy project that will trace the lived effects of parent and grandparent Canadian sponsorship policies, including their rapid including their rapid shifts, for immigrant families’ transnational care arrangements associated with ageing.
Research Questions
- How do Canadian immigrant families deal with the challenges of care and support for older parents and grandparents (PGPs) who live outside Canada?
- Which families wish to bring their older family members here, under what conditions and how do they organize to do so?
- How do these families cope with Canada’s rapidly shifting parent and grandparent immigration policies?
- What difference does provincial jurisdiction make, if any?
The Research Team
