'I felt embarrassed and humiliated'

Woman suing Air Canada, Ottawa after family's visas were cancelled while en route to Canada

- NICHOLAS KEUNG

Paula Mejias with her children, Santiago, now 17, Victoria, 10, and Paul, 9. They were in transit in Panama from Venezuela in 2017 to visit Mejias's husband, an international student in Toronto, when their visas were cancelled. A month later, Canadian immigration officials reissued their visas and the family flew to Toronto.

With three young kids in tow, Paula Mejias was excited to visit her husband, the children’s father, who was an international student in Canada. They had been apart for almost seven months.

During their stopover in Panama, the Venezuelan woman was questioned by an Air Canada agent about their trip and made to wait at the check-in counter as other passengers walked past them and went on to the boarding gates.

After almost two hours, she and her kids — then 10, three and two — were handed back their passports and told they could not continue their journey because their Canadian visas had been cancelled.

Mejias was horrified when she opened their passports and saw the words “CANCELLED CBSA” scribbled across their visas.

“No reasonable government official would cancel a person’s visa before first talking to that person,” Mejias said in an interview.

“The defacing of a person’s visa by an airline employee who is not a government official was a glaring impropriety.”

Little did the 41-year-old mother expect that she and her children would be stuck in Panama for more than a month to fight to get their visas reinstated, and join Pedro Emilio Garcia Molina in Canada.