A significant amendment to section 4 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations was brought into force on September 30, 2010.   
The former regulation 4 provision required two mandatory elements for determining “bad faith” relationships:
  1. relationship is not genuine; and
  2. it was entered into primarily for the purpose of acquiring any status or privilege under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.
Both elements had to be met when refusing a sponsorship application under the spousal, common-law or conjugal relationship category and when supporting that decision on appeal.
The amended regulation 4 provision now provides for each of the two “bad faith” tests to stand on its own. The amended regulation reads as follows:
4. (1) For the purposes of these Regulations, a foreign national shall not be considered a spouse, a common-law partner or a conjugal partner of a person if the marriage, common-law partnership or conjugal partnership
(a) was entered into primarily for the purpose of acquiring any status or privilege under the Act; or
(b) is not genuine.
The requirement that only one of the two criteria will need to be present to determine that a relationship is not bona fide lowers the threshold required to be met in order to refuse an application under this category. Moreover, since a hearing before the Immigration Appeal Division (IAD) is considered to be a fresh hearing of the case, the IAD will base its decisions on the law that is presently in force as opposed to the law that was in force at the time of the original decision made by the officer.