Canada’s dream daycare program

 

 

One of the recurring program changes that Canada Immigration considered between 2008 and July 1, 2012 was the proposal to impose a four-year limit on temporary foreign work in Canada and a four-year waiting period to return to Canada. This was supposed to include all temporary foreign workers, without exception.

 

On April 1, 2011, Canada Immigration implemented this program but Canada’s Immigration Minister Jason Kenney had a change of heart and exempted the Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP) from the four-year limit on temporary work visas, thus continuing the right of foreign domestic workers to apply for permanent residence after completing two-years of live-in service. Maybe the thousands of Filipino caregivers under the LCP have worked their magic charm on Mr. Kenney after they have hailed him as their hero and the “king of Canada’s multiculturalism.”

Filipino nanny takes care of employer's child. Photo courtesy of Kia, Marin & Liam.
Click http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDsbr_X2uV8 to view  "Nanny Documentary 1."

But the exemption covers only those caregivers who have already completed their work contracts and have submitted their applications for permanent residence when the new rules took effect in 2011. We just have to wait and see if the final Rules and Regulations in January 2013 will still contain this important exemption for workers under the LCP.

 

There is reason to worry because this has been done before by the Canadian government. Before the Foreign Domestic Movement in 1981 and the LCP in 1992 were adopted, foreign domestic workers, particularly those from Europe and those of English ancestry, were given the right to enter and stay. Prior to the 1970s, domestics from Britain were granted permanent residence after providing live-in services for six months. These domestics were given this right with the eye toward their future roles as wives and mothers. But this right was not given to Caribbean women who were allowed to enter Canada under short-term work permits. 

The LCP and the previous Foreign Domestic Movement program were seen by Third World domestic workers as the necessary purgatory to obtain permanent residence. But this may change if the path to permanent residence will be removed from the program by Canada Immigration in 2013.

 

Right now, nanny placement agencies in Canada are looking for various alternatives in case the LCP becomes a four-year temporary contract without giving workers hired under the LCP to apply for permanent residence after two years. The only reason why the LCP has become so popular, especially among Filipino women, is because these workers look at their mandatory two-year live-in requirement as a transition to a better future. These workers are unlikely to complain no matter how exploitative their work and living situations are. Even if their work amounts to being underemployed and de-skilled, it is still better than remaining in the Philippines with no prospect of a better future. Judging from the success of their predecessors, they all know they can also do well in the open job market after becoming permanent residents.

 

An alternative being considered by nanny placement agencies is the hiring of au pairs from Europe for 12 months under the existing working holiday visas. These visas are faster to process and since holiday visa workers do not stay permanently after one year, this option for Canadian families is of low cost to the government.

 

Daycare has always been a critical problem for Canada’s young families, where many Canadian women are torn between the choice of keeping their professional careers and putting them on hold to look after their young children. The cost of daycare has also increased sharply in the last 20 years, driving spouses to consider alternative working hours so that one parent is left to provide care to the children while the other works. This is especially true for parents who prefer home-based child care rather than the child care centre. It is estimated that the national average for child care in Canada is more than $4,500 a year, and 7.8 percent of a family’s budget is directed to child care.

Click link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYtPycoW9ng to view "The
Canadian National Child Care Policy."

There has been a move toward regulated child care in all provinces, away from informal family arrangements. In Quebec, which subsidizes daycare heavily, 72 percent of children attend regulated centres. In the rest of Canada, the rate is 40 percent. It is also estimated that more than 165,000 regulated spots are needed to meet the demand for space.

 

In Quebec, its newly-elected premier Pauline Marois has promised low-cost day care for all families, a project which she launched 15 years ago when she was education minister in 1997. The heavily government subsidized $7-a-day daycare system has been plagued by a shortage of available spaces and many families have been on the waiting list for so long. Marois promises to create 28,000 new spaces, a project which will take four years and cost the province $261 million more per year. But this project, according to Marois, will eventually leave the province with a spot for every child.

 

A recent study showed that the Quebec daycare system works and it provides economic benefits to families and has helped single parents to enter the workforce. The study also concluded that the province’s daycare program added 1.7 per cent to Quebec’s GDP in 2008 and brought back $1.50 in tax revenue for the federal and provincial governments, combined, for every $1 spent by Quebec. In Ottawa, the last time the federal government toyed with the idea of creating a national daycare system based on the Quebec plan was during the Liberal government under Paul Martin.

 

At present, Canada provides cash transfers and tax exemptions for child care services that benefit disproportionately the wealthiest Canadians, but offer very little support to middle-class families. Outside Quebec, parents are paying between $1,000 to $2,000 a month for each child care space, an enormous fraction of a middle class family’s income.

 

The concept of a national childcare program has been proposed by the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in 1970. Finding that reliable child care is fundamental to women’s equality in employment, the Commission recommended that “the federal government immediately take steps to enter into agreements with provinces leading to adoption of a national Daycare Act.” The Vanier Institute of the Family also noted that “most women and men expect to have jobs and careers. With the high cost of living, most families require two earners to achieve an average standard of living.”

 

Nothing has been accomplished at the federal level and the provinces—with the exception of Quebec—in successfully implementing an effective and low-cost daycare program.

By virtue of default by the federal and provincial levels of government, the Live-in Caregiver Program has become Canada’s substitute daycare program: home-based daycare plus the added benefit of a caregiver who looks after housekeeping, cooking and other menial chores that Canadian mothers would prefer not to do by themselves. It’s a dream daycare program: low-cost to the government, and an affordable and comfortable luxury to families who can afford to hire a live-in caregiver.

 

However, the mandatory live-in residence requirement for LCP workers undermines the LCP workers’ personal freedoms and increases their vulnerability to every form of abuse and exploitation. Domestic workers have to endure two years of indentured service just to have a shot at the prize of landed or permanent resident status.

 

Whether live-in caregivers keep their chances of gaining permanent residence after two years of work, the obvious winner in this type of arrangement is the Canadian government. Foreign domestic workers bear the heaviest of burden among all new immigrants—that of modern-day slavery only to get a crack at that much-vaunted Canadian life in the future, while others get instant landed status and the opportunity to pursue the careers they’ve prepared for.

What now?

The federal elections are over, yet the debris from the exchange of opinions between members of our community regarding immigration issues and Canada’s Live-in Caregiver Program are still scattered around us and on the Internet and need to be cleaned up. Just like party volunteers picking up their candidates’ signs from the yards of their supporters the day after the election, maybe we should also continue the political discourse by tidying up our muddled thoughts of the dangerous illusions peddled by some of our opinion-makers from the right.

Not that this would alter the election results, but we need to preserve, or even rescue, the objective truth from the rubbish heap of opinions caused by the recent exchange of ideas. Somehow, the truth becomes the casualty if we allow the celebratory euphoria of the party in power to drown it.

Baguhin Coalition leader Julius Tiangson speaks before a candidate's rally at
Brampton-Springdale. In the background from right to left: Canada Minister
for Immigration Jason Kenny and Parm Gill, Conservative candidate. Photo
courtesy of Currents & Breaking News.

This essay focuses particularly on the opinions made by Mr. Julius Tiangson, an ardent Conservative Party supporter who is also the Executive Director of Gateway Centre for New Canadians (GCNC) in Mississauga, a government-funded settlement services agency. On Sundays, the aforementioned centre doubles up as a house of worship where Mr. Tiangson ministers to his religious congregation as a man of the cloth.

In one of his letters to the community by way of chat groups in the Internet, Mr. Tiangson wrote that a legislation introduced by the Conservative government in 2010, called The Cracking Down on Crooked Consultants Act, “would definitely curtail the ability of lawyers and consultants to charged (sic) exorbitant amount of money to vulnerable people.” Here he was referring to lawyers and consultants who charge excessive fees for their services, whom he had by and large accused of taking advantage of immigrants and refugees who have no chance at all in succeeding in their applications.

His patron, the Minister for Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, Mr. Jason Kenny, was however more subtle and discreet during a press interview when he said: “While most immigration consultants working in Canada are legitimate and ethical, it is clear that immigration fraud remains a widespread threat to the integrity of Canada’s immigration system.”

The Act never intended to regulate fees being charged by lawyers and immigration consultants for their services. If this was the Act’s purpose, then it should have provided a tariff by which lawyers and consultants would observe when billing their clients. So, Mr. Tiangson is spreading misinformation that is both false and inaccurate.

Mr. Tiangson appears to be shooting from the hip by targeting lawyers and consultants for their unreasonable fees, when he could also be in the position of being overcompensated by the government for running a settlement services agency. How much do his government contracts allow him to allot for his individual salary? And why would that compensation cover for time he spent campaigning during the election for a Conservative Party candidate?

While tracing the history of the live-in caregiver program to the days of indentured slavery of yore, Mr. Tiangson, however, only browses the real causes of labour migration and even blames Filipinos for being complicit with their racialization here in Canada. He was of course referring to the fact that 90 per cent of participants in the live-in caregiver program are Filipino women, yet at the same time affirming that “it was the only way out” for thousands of Filipino women.

Mr. Tiangson has failed to comprehend from his limited understanding of the history of domestic work and its roots in slavery that this workforce is largely immigrant and composed of women of colour. Their exclusion from legal protections means that domestic work is less valuable than work outside of the home. This devaluation and dehumanization of domestic work pushed the demand in Canada for live-in caregivers because women were no longer willing to perform household work and stay home with their employers.

Where else will Canada get its nannies but from poor countries such as the Philippines with its a big surplus of cheap and unemployed labour? To blame Filipino women for being complicit with their stereotypical identification as nannies in the lowest rung of the labour force is not only unpatriotic but also betrays one’s lack of appreciation of the economic forces that motivate overseas migration of labour. To say that it’s their only “way out” is condescending to these women, instead of pinpointing that the real culprit is poverty that drives people to migrate. This also diminishes the culpability of the Philippine government for its failure to improve the economic conditions that will provide for decent jobs and better living conditions for its people.

There are significant push factors for migration such as poverty-level incomes, low wages in the rural areas, and lack of employment opportunities in poor countries, coupled with higher wages and greater job opportunities in urban areas and rich nations. Despite its beneficial trade benefits, globalization has created an ever-widening wealth gap between countries, and rural and urban areas within countries.

On its part, the Canadian government is likewise responsible for providing opportunities to exploit Filipino nannies. It has capitalized on the economic inequalities of globalization by installing a caregiver program that is inherently flawed and ripe for exploitation and abuse. The Conservative government’s regulatory changes, which Mr. Tiangson likes to call them instead of the more common term “legislative changes” (as if the results would be different), are yet another tactic to justify the perpetuation and expansion of a modern-day slavery program.

Mr. Tiangson appears to turn a blind eye to what the Conservative government has really achieved, that is, to pit competing interests in the Filipino community by encouraging one group to go up against another, thus stemming the growing movement of caregivers to liberate themselves from exploitation and abuse.

Being pragmatic for Mr. Tiangson means working with “politicians and who would listen and act.” Now that his coalition was able to purge Ruby Dhalla from the federal Parliament, with the group’s contribution hardly mentioned by the mainstream media, it remains to be seen whether the new Member of Parliament from Brampton-Springdale and Canada Immigration Minister Jason Kenney can deliver their avowed promises to improve the plight of Filipino caregivers.

Short of abolishing the exploitative mandatory live-in requirement and granting immediate permanent residence upon arrival, it is almost conceivable that the current regulatory changes to the Live-in Caregiver Program, in the words of Mr. Tiangson, would end up as “a dismal failure.”