She Got Kicked Out of Canada. Their Story Didn’t End There.

Dr. David Edward-Ooi Poon was living in Toronto and studying to be a public health physician in the spring of 2020 when he had a premonition that something awful was about to happen.

Canada had started clamping down on international visitors days after the World Health Organization declared a worldwide Covid pandemic on March 11, 2020. On April 10, Dr. Poon’s girlfriend, Alexandria Jasmin Aquino, of Bray, Ireland, had boarded a plane to Toronto for a visit both were sure had been cleared by authorities.

“That’s when the ‘Oh, no’ moment happened,” Dr. Poon said.

Ms. Aquino, who goes by AJ, had worked as a frontline nurse in Dublin at the time. She “had made it all the way here — we had our feet in the same country,” Dr. Poon said. But before they could celebrate or even set eyes on each other, a border guard confiscated her passport and rerouted her on the next flight back to Ireland.

“I was devastated,” Dr. Poon said. “I was isolated, the world was seemingly collapsing, and the person who gave me so much hope had been treated like a criminal and sent out of the country.”

A month later, the two formed Faces of Advocacy, a grass roots group that would eventually attract 11,000 members in its efforts to reunite couples and families separated by pandemic border restrictions.

Dr. Poon, 38, and Ms. Aquino, 28, met on Tinder in July 2017. Ms. Aquino had no dating app experience, but she was feeling adventurous while on vacation with her family in Toronto and signed up on a whim. “It was impulsive, like getting a new haircut,” she said. She swiped right on Dr. Poon because of his profile photo. In it, he was wearing autographed Spider-Man underpants, his arm around the Marvel Comics creator Stan Lee. “I thought, wow, this guy has to be one of a kind or some kind of maniac.”

On July 25, they met in Toronto’s Kensington Market. Ms. Aquino, who hadn’t told her mother, Iris Adeva, and stepfather, Ralph Adeva, that she was going on a date, was two hours late. “I couldn’t figure out a way to sneak off to meet him,” she said. “I was a hot mess.”

Dr. Poon was ready to go home when she finally arrived. “But then I had this huge sense of relief,” he said, because the person he had been getting to know through a week of app messaging seemed just as compelling in person.

“She’s really funny, and I found her super attractive,” he said. Instead of sitting down to dinner, something Dr. Poon wanted to avoid because he is a messy eater — “I have a friend who describes me as the ugliest eater he’s ever seen,” he said — they strolled the market. They told each other dad jokes and talked about their pasts. When Ms. Aquino’s ride back to her hotel arrived, they kissed good night.

Dr. Poon grew up in the western Canadian province of Saskatchewan. His mother, Dr. Teik Im Ooi, is Malaysian; his father, Dr. Edward Toyin Poon, was born in China. Both are family physicians. His parents had met in medical school and moved to Canada in 1984. When Dr. Poon left Saskatchewan for the University of Alberta, where he got a bachelor’s degree in medical science, they divorced. But they had long been united in wanting their son to study medicine. In his 20s, Dr. Poon was briefly a standup comedian. Back then, before “heightened cultural sensitivity,” he said, he used to tell a joke about the medical exam being the Asian bar mitzvah.

In 2021, two years after completing his family medicine residency at Toronto Western Hospital, he earned a master’s degree in public health at Columbia. Last year, he finished a public health and preventive medicine residency at the University of Toronto and became a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Canada. He is now working toward a master of studies in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy at Oxford and expects to graduate next year.

He also has two jobs. By day, Dr. Poon is a medical health officer for Northern Medical Services in Saskatchewan, where his hours are mostly virtual because commuting requires a flight plus an hourslong drive. At night, he is a general practitioner psychotherapist at Toronto’s Comprehensive Treatment Clinic, specializing in addictions, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety.

In the early 2000s, Ms. Aquino’s mother had immigrated to Ireland from the Philippines as a nurse. She successfully petitioned to have her daughter, then 5, and husband join her. Ms. Aquino’s father died of cancer less than a year later. “She was a widow at 28 and provided as much as she could with the cards she was dealt,” Ms. Aquino said.

Ms. Aquino graduated from University College Dublin with a bachelor’s degree in nursing. She later earned a master’s degree in marketing from King’s College London. In Toronto, where she now lives with Dr. Poon, she works as a disability case manager at Manulife, an insurance company.

After their first date at Kensington Market, Ms. Aquino returned to Ireland, and Dr. Poon resumed his life in Toronto, caring for patients as a family medicine resident at the University of Toronto. For more than a year, they kept in touch by texting. Dr. Poon wanted to pick up the pace of the courtship and pressed for more visits. But Ms. Aquino, whose mother and stepfather wouldn’t have approved of how she met Dr. Poon, wasn’t ready.

By October 2018, he was despondent enough to tell her he wasn’t sure the relationship would last without a visit to look forward to. She flew to Toronto that month. “I honestly had never met anyone like David in my life,” Ms. Aquino said. “I thought it would be stupid of me to not even try to make it work.”

To help her feel safe in advance of what would become a three-week stay in Canada, Dr. Poon pre-emptively sent her a clean police record check. She appreciated that: “I was an avid crime documentary fan. I didn’t want to end up featured on ‘60 Minutes.’”

While Dr. Poon worked those three weeks, she cleaned his untidy apartment — her way of showing affection, she said — and got to know the city. At night, he brought her Filipino fast food, which she couldn’t get in Ireland. “That was really sweet, and it definitely solidified my feelings for David,” she said.

But it would take them several more months of traveling between the two countries to exchange I love you’s. They had been a couple a little more than a year when the World Health Organization made its pandemic announcement.

The scene at the airport when Ms. Aquino arrived for the foiled April 2020 visit left her terrified. She said an agent had accused her of lying about clearing the visit through organizations including the Canadian embassy. After her passport was confiscated, she was escorted through the terminal.

She was heartsick. “People were dying, and we didn’t know when we would see each other again,” she said.

It ended up being that month. Ireland’s 2020 border laws were less restrictive than Canada’s. While the world adjusted to its new reality, he stayed with Ms. Aquino and her family for three months, the maximum Ireland then allowed.

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Faces of Advocacy was already finding supporters online. Separation stories were pouring in: A pregnant Canadian woman married to an American man couldn’t get clearance for her husband to be with her when she gave birth. The British fiancé of a woman being treated for cancer in Canada wasn’t able to be at her bedside to comfort her. A Canadian mother had to say goodbye to her American children via FaceTime as she died in a hospital from liver failure.

Given the gravity of these situations, “It was quickly apparent that AJ and I were not the story,” Dr. Poon said.

By the fall of 2020, Faces of Advocacy had 10,000 members, and Dr. Poon had spoken at a parliamentary news conference at Parliament Hill in Ottawa, and was booking TV interviews. “We had a simple message,” he said. “We are not asking for open borders. We are just asking to be together.”

In October, Canada started allowing what became known as “extended family and compassionate exemptions” into the country. “That was our victory,” he said.

On May 23, 2023, he proposed to Ms. Aquino at their Toronto condominium. She had moved to Toronto a year earlier and became a permanent resident in January.

On Aug. 4, Dr. Poon and Ms. Aquino were married at the Toronto Reference Library. Virginia Ceni, an officiant through the Registrar General of the Province of Ontario, conducted a simple ceremony for 60 guests.

Ms. Aquino wore a long white dress she bought on sale at lulus.com. Dr. Poon wore a green suit, also on sale, that he shopped for at Kensington Market. “Our vows were quiet, personal and only shared with each other,” Dr. Poon said. “We wanted it to be intimate, nothing showy at all,” Ms. Aquino added.

That is not to say they didn’t celebrate. After they were pronounced married, the couple welcomed 140 friends and family members for a karaoke reception at the library. Many had crossed the border to be there.

To kick off the party, the couple sang a duet of what they consider their song, “Summer Sunshine,” by the Irish band the Corrs. Afterward, they formed a quartet with their mothers to sing “The Twist” by Chubby Checker.

The twists they had endured to be together seemed behind them, finally. “Marrying AJ felt incredible,” Dr. Poon said. “It was the capstone of a challenging and fulfilling journey. It represented everything we had to do to never give up.”

On This Day

When Aug. 4, 2024

Where The Toronto Reference Library, Toronto

Supporters, Then and Now Wedding guests included Faces of Advocacy members, among them John McCall, the widower of the Canadian mother who said goodbye to her children via FaceTime, and his daughter, Meghan Owens.

Poetry in Motion The founders of Poesy, a Toronto artist group that uses typewriters to write live poetry, also attended. Dr. Poon and Ms. Aquino discovered the writers the day after their engagement at a Toronto book festival; the poets wrote them a free poem to mark the engagement.

Cross-Border Flavors Tita Flips, a Toronto Filipino restaurant, catered the reception. Guests chose from Filipino favorites including chicken adobo and Malaysian specialties like spicy noodle soup, plus Chinese and Jamaican dishes. Deep-fried bananas and shaved ice — Filipino halo-halo and Malaysian ice kachang — were among the desserts.

Forever Advocates Dr. Poon and Ms. Aquino are still running Faces of Advocacy. “We do it so future immigrants reuniting with their family in Canada can feel secure knowing that an independent body will ensure they are treated fairly, consistently and transparently,” Dr. Poon said.