OTTAWA

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney has confirmed that his officials are keeping note of legal practices in other countries that would be considered crimes in Canada to help further screen potential immigrants down the road.

"We want to be able to assess whether people applying for immigration into Canada should be inadmissible, but are not," Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said in Winnipeg on Monday.

He said he doesn't like that immigrants who beat their wives or carry weapons, for instance, can slip into Canada simply because those actions are legal in their home countries and so they carry no criminal record, which would be easily seen on an application.

"In some countries spousal abuse is not a crime," Kenney said. "In some countries, so-called honour killings aren't really treated as a crime."

QMI Agency reported last week that immigration authorities have asked officers posted abroad to collect information on such practices for a criteria review scheduled to end later this year.

An instruction sent from Ottawa last summer asked foreign-posted officers to give a priority to things like domestic abuse, polygamy, carrying a concealed weapon, and the cultivation and marketing of the drug khat.

Immigration lawyer Richard Kurland says he believes the information gleaned from the exercise would be used to better filter immigration applications.

Kenney confirmed that.

"We want to make sure that the people we admit to Canada are going to respect our laws - first and foremost the equality of men and women - and that they've not engaged in violent practices in a country where that might be legal," Kenney said.

- files from from Nicole Dube