The organizers of an international health conference that was originally scheduled to take place next year in Calgary have relocated the event to Bali because of what they say are “severe delays” in visa approvals.
The International Health Economics Association’s annual congress is held every two years and typically sees more than 1,000 delegates from dozens of countries. But the IHEA says it can’t take the risk of holding the 2025 event in Canada in the face of visa processing times that can take up to eight months, in addition to what the association describes as high costs.
“We’ve decided to withdraw the conference from Canada and to hold it in a country that has a less discriminatory visa regime,” IHEA president Kara Hanson said in an interview.
“I’m enormously disappointed and really frustrated.”
Dr. Hanson said the IHEA aims to bring people together from different parts of the world to collaborate and share their research.
“It really is unfair and I think it’s an enormous act of self-harm on behalf of the immigration authorities in Canada to make it so difficult for people with legitimate reasons to travel across the border,” she said.
Some academics in Canada say the visa issues cited by the IHEA are part of a pattern that has made it difficult for researchers to come to this country for conferences and other work.
Visa issues hampered the International AIDS Conference in Montreal in 2022, when hundreds of delegates from developing countries complained that they were unable to attend because their visa applications were rejected or stalled at a handful of Canadian missions abroad.
Isabelle Dubois, spokesperson for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, said in an e-mail that the department “successfully assists hundreds of organizers of international events” and this year alone, has seen more than 400 events registered with IRCC.
“We can confirm that IHEA registered their 2025 event and received a code to benefit from our services, but later requested a cancellation,” Ms. Dubois said. “The decision to change the event’s location was made by the organizer.”
She said the conference organizer met with the IRCC in May to discuss visa processing.
Ms. Dubois added that the department is working to speed up its application process, including by hiring new processing staff in 2022.
Meredith Terretta, a history professor at the University of Ottawa and principal investigator on Visa Barrier, a project that tracks visa issues for African scholars seeking to come to Canada, said there doesn’t seem to be a pattern in whose applications are rejected.
Prof. Terretta said she is currently running an international research training group. She invited two professors (one from Ghana, one from Cameroon) and four PhD students (two from Ghana and two from Cameroon).
Of them all, only three of the four students got their visas. Neither of the professors got theirs.
“It makes it very difficult to arrange events or even strategize how to deal with this issue when the results are so random,” she said.
Madhukar Pai, Canada Research Chair in epidemiology and global health at McGill University and associate director of the McGill International TB Centre, urged the federal government to address delays in visa decisions.
“We should also be looking at systematic biases against some regions,” he said. “The African region, to me, is absolutely critical. You cannot have an anti-Africa bias in a policy. There are amazing experts from Africa who deserve a chance to come here to study and work.”
Dr. Pai said he still recalls the disappointment of being denied a visa into the United States as a student in the 1990s, when he was set to attend a summer program at John Hopkins University.
He lined up for hours outside a U.S. consulate in India only to have his application rejected after an interview that he said took no more than 30 seconds.
“I went home crying. It took me days to recover from that trauma and I still think about it,” he said.
Fatima Raza