WATCH: A pregnant Victoria woman is pleading with Canada’s immigration minister to allow her fiancé into the country. Charles Frost applied for a visitor’s visa from his home in Jamaica earlier this year. He wants to be in Canada during the birth of the couple’s first child next month. As Mary Griffin reports, Eloise Patermore was infected with the Zika virus that prevents her from travelling.
Twenty-two year old Eloise Patmore, 26-year-old fiancé Charles Frost regularly speak to each other via Skype.
“Remember to look at the camera because your eyes are going everywhere, OK,” Patmore told Frost on Friday.
But it’s not the way the couple would like to be talking to each other. The couple met three years ago while working for the same company and they fell in love.
“I just happened to fall in love with a Jamaican, and he happened to fall in love with a Canadian,” Patmore said.
Patmore is now eight months pregnant but Frost can’t get a visitor’s visa to come to Canada. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada rejected his application, and the couple lost a subsequent appeal. Frost is a student completing a degree in education, and math but he wants to be in Victoria for the birth of their first child.
“Why is it important for me to come to Canada? It’s really essential to that spirit of family that I hold very close to my heart, you know,” Frost said.
Patmore works for a local gardening company but spends every spare moment working on her fiancé’s case.
“If I start to cry about it, I won’t stop. So, I just try and remain level headed. And we are just basically going to keep trying until the baby comes,” Patmore said.
Another complication is that Patmore can’t travel during this last stage of her pregnancy. “At the moment, I’m not able to travel outside of B.C. because at some point, in the last couple of years, we’re not sure when. I have contracted the Zika virus,” Patmore said.
In Jamaica, Zika is a risk for pregnant women, according to the BC Centre for Disease Control. Doctors say Patmore’s baby appears to be developing normally.
The couple is working now to get the attention of federal Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen. Patmore made this video appeal to the minister, asking viewers to send this link to his office.
Patermore, and her lawyer, Julia Coombe, have reached out to Victoria NDP MP Murray Rankin for help. Rankin’s staff is working with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada to determine why Frost’s visa was refused in the first place. The MP personally delivered a letter to Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Minister Ahmed Hussen in Ottawa on April 18, asking for compassionate consideration in this case. But no one, including CHEK News, has heard from the minister’s office.
Mary Griffin
