Article content continued

By virtue of being a Crown witness in the case, the woman got temporary resident status. She testified she expects to now get permanent status in Canada.

The woman said she came to Canada to save her 13-year-old daughter from having her genitals mutilated in a ceremony known as female circumcision. Girls have been known to bleed to death, the woman said.

During the ceremony, the blood of the girl’s mother must be smeared on the temple walls, the woman explained. If she never returns to Nigeria, the ceremony can’t take place.

But a tribunal of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada denied the woman’s claim, saying if she truly had wanted to save her daughter, she would not have left her behind in Nigeria.

The woman came to Canada in January 2013 with a fake passport. She testified that as soon as she landed in Montreal, she immediately told immigration officials her real identity to start a refugee claim.

She was detained for several weeks until she obtained documents from Nigeria to confirm her identity, she said. She was released pending the outcome of her refugee claim.

The woman didn’t want to endure another Montreal winter, so she moved to the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke, and later, Brampton.

That’s where she was living when in 2015, she went on Plenty of Fish looking for “a serious man ready to settle down,” she testified. In May, she met the man from Windsor and had sex with him in his hotel room that night.

They got a marriage licence six days later.