Nanny-Gate in Canada

George Abraham (Canada Connection)
www.khaleejtimes.com
3 June 2009

No less than American civil rights icon Martin Luther King called Canada “the North Star” when it comes to guaranteeing freedoms.

The three caregivers now at the center of “nanny-gate” would hardly say so. In their view, Canada is treating them like “guest workers” in a less than egalitarian society, where the interests of employers trump those of wage earners. Most of Canada’s attention is focused on the political career of the MP who denies she employed these three Filipino women. That is off the mark. What is at stake is the image of Canada as portrayed by Martin Luther King in a radio address in 1967: “Deep in our history of struggle for freedom, Canada was the North Star.

The Negro slave, denied education, dehumanised, imprisoned on cruel plantations, knew that far to the north a land existed where a fugitive slave if he survived the horrors of the journey could find freedom.” He was referring to the days of the Underground Railroad in the mid-19th century when 30,000 slaves found shelter in Canada to begin new, liberated lives. The reverse might be true today. About 100,000, mostly women from the Philippines, have arrived in Canada as “live-in caregivers” without basic protections, without citizenship or the right to permanent residency. They work under conditions that are hard to regulate, far from the public eye and closed to outside supervision. Canadians have assumed that because nobody has so far gone to a human rights tribunal or aired their grievances through the media, these guest workers are thriving in their new homes, providing much-needed comfort and support to babies and the elderly.

Canadians are asking themselves if these temporary workers are doing more harm than good to the image of Canada. With the reinvention of the immigration system last year to take in more applicants who meet job market requirements, Canada should be able to fast track those with skills in high demand. According to CIC’s Action Plan for Faster Immigration, applicants in 38 high-demand occupations should be able to immigrate to Canada within six months, as compared to the waiting period of six years earlier.

That Canada needs a temporary worker programme at all is an admission of the failure of immigration policy over the years. By allowing the waiting list to balloon to 900,000 applicants — including 600,000 in the skilled worker category — even professions in high demand had to wait their turn. Secondly, there was no way of prioritising applicants by skills, and so if masons were badly needed in Saskatchewan, there was no way the provincial government could select them off the waiting list.

While it is debatable whether Canada will need foreign IT consultants in perpetuity, I don’t see how it will need fewer live-in caregivers next year than it does this year. Canada will inevitably need caregivers in ever-increasing numbers. Therefore, it begs credulity to lump live-in caregivers into the category of temporary workers who need to renew their work permits periodically and place themselves at the mercy of employers if ever they want to become Canadian citizens.

Bringing nannies into the country on employer-provided work permits to earn a livelihood and support their families back home places these guest workers in an extremely vulnerable situation. Add to that the fact that they often work in private homes where working conditions could be, let’s say, open to interpretation. Who is to tell whether a workday is eight hours or 16 hours? For that matter, who is to define what constitutes “work”? And, finally, their “pathway to residency” is paved by the employer, to be yanked on a whim.

George Abraham is contributing editor of Diplomat and International Canada 
published from Ottawa