The Federal Court of Canada yesterday stayed the deportation of a Guyanese father, allowing him to remain for the moment in Canada with his daughter, a Canadian aboriginal girl for whom he is the sole guardian.
According to a Toronto Star report, the court granted the stay at an emergency hearing into the plea by Curtis Lewis, effectively postponing his deportation to Guyana until a government tribunal decides whether to reopen his appeal to restore his permanent resident status.
Lewis, who migrated with his family to Canada in 1966 at the age of 7, has never returned to Guyana and has no family here, the report said.
“It’s a huge load lifted off my shoulders,” he was quoted as saying in the report, after he got the news of the stay late yesterday, just hours before he was supposed to leave his sister’s Ajax home with his seven-year-old daughter for their flight to Guyana. “I didn’t sleep. I was thinking we’d get to Guyana at 6am and I’d have to feed her and find a hotel. We have nobody in Guyana and we wouldn’t know where to look,” he noted.
The Star report said the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) had scheduled Lewis’ deportation with his daughter,
