Soccer’s international governing body FIFA criticized Canada’s decision not to recognize documents FIFA and a Canadian senator had given to female athletes and others who were scrambling to flee Afghanistan after the Taliban took over in 2021.<\/p>\n
Canada refused to accept “visa facilitation letters” that FIFA and Canadian Senator Marilou McPhedran handed out based on a template provided by a CDND employee in attempts to evacuate 640 women athletes, coaches and others, according to court documents.<\/p>\n
Canada labeled those letters as ‘inauthentic’ and that it did not authorize anyone to issue them, asking the police to investigate their distribution.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs FIFA, we are deeply concerned about the apparent change of mind of the Canadian authorities not to honor the visa facilitation letters,\u201d reads a Sept. 21, 2021, email from FIFA Chief Social Responsibility and Education Officer Joyce Cook to an Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada staffer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Soccer’s international governing body FIFA criticized Canada’s decision not to recognize documents FIFA and a Canadian senator had given to female athletes and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":137,"featured_media":433638,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false},"tags":[17367],"news_category":[14235],"gn_keywords":[432],"acf":{"announce":"Canada refused to accept \"visa facilitation letters\" for women athletes","video":[]},"rank_math_focus_keyword":"","rank_math_description":"","rank_math_title":"","rank_math_robots":"","rank_math_canonical_url":"","rank_math_facebook_title":"","rank_math_facebook_description":"","rank_math_facebook_image":"","rank_math_twitter_title":"","rank_math_twitter_description":"","rank_math_twitter_image":"","rank_math_snippet_shortcode":"","rank_math_primary_category":"","rankmath_seo":{"focus_keyword":"","description":"","title":"","canonical_url":"","robots":"","facebook":{"title":"","description":"","image":""},"twitter":{"title":"","description":"","image":""}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/433637"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/137"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=433637"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/433637\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/433638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=433637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=433637"},{"taxonomy":"news_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news_category?post=433637"},{"taxonomy":"gn_keywords","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/7sport.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/gn_keywords?post=433637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}