The caregiver quandary
Canada’s program for live-in helpers is popular but problematic
VANCOUVER Angelica Maico arrived from the Philippines in the summer of 2012. She works as a live-in caregiver for the two young children of her sister and her husband.
Living with her extended family in east Vancouver, Maico is grateful she has Skype to communicate with her own daughter and son in the Philippines, to whom she sends money.
Like the vast majority of the more than 100,000 Filipino women who have come to Canada through the Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP), Maico, 43, plans to get out of domestic work after the mandated minimum of two years.
Maico hopes to upgrade her skills as a graphic designer and “start a new life.”
She plans to apply after two years for her teenage daughter and perhaps her older son to immigrate to Canada. She’s been estranged from her husband for 14 years.
Live-in caregivers like Maico have become a feature of Canadian cities. They are often met pushing strollers, babysitting in parks or supporting frail seniors. Whenever the media covers live-in caregivers, the angle usually focuses on their difficult working conditions and separation from faraway families.
But many other questions are arising about Canada’s unique Live-in Caregivers Program (LCP) — including whether too many foreign domestic caregivers are coming to work only for their extended families, whether it leads to poor economic outcomes and whether the LCP has, in the words of an immigration department document, become a “hidden form of family reunification.”
Canada is the first choice for many live-in caregivers from the Philippines, which exports 10 million members of its workforce.
Hundreds of schools in the Philippines train women and a few men as live-in helpers, particularly to serve as temporary workers in Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Australia, the U.S. and the Middle East.
But Canada often tops caregivers’ lists as a destination because it’s the only country that offers the privilege of citizenship to domestic workers, more than nine out of 10 of whom in Canada are Filipino women.
“The only thing Canada offers is permanent residency. Why else would a caregiver come here? Without it you’d just go somewhere else,” says Lorina Serafico, a former live-in-caregiver from the Philippines who is now a mortgage broker. She co-leads the Vancouver Committee for Domestic Workers and Caregivers Rights.
The main reason Filipino women are willing to work long hours at low pay in Canada is to gain citizenship and sponsor loved ones to immigrate, says Serafico, 51.
However, the popularity of Canada’s LCP is raising a host of questions — from the federal department of immigration, educational and labour market researchers and migration policy specialists.
They want to know if there are better ways to design a program that has roughly 20,000 foreign live-in-caregivers working in Canada at any one time. The numbers working in the field comprise only a fraction of those who have come to the country through the program, since extremely few stick with live-in work.
The LCP has proven so desirable in the 30 years since it began that most of the 625,000 Filipinos now in Canada directly or indirectly trace their arrival to it, Serafico says.
Despite its popularity among many Canadian Filipino voters, Immigration Canada has posted a document on its website raising questions about the LCP.
A major concern in the document, titled Immigration Levels and Mix, is whether the LCP has become a “hidden form of family reunification.”
Significantly, adds the document, “analysis from visa offices processing LCP applications suggests that ... as many as 40 per cent of live-in caregivers come to work for relatives in Canada, raising the question of whether such employment would be available for non-family members.”
The department’s online document minimizes a private report from the Canadian consulate in the Philippines, which was obtained under access-to-information legislation by Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland. The report pegs the portion of Filipino caregivers working in Canada for their own relatives at 40 to 70 per cent.
Prod Laquian, a UBC professor emeritus who was raised in the Philippines and has written about Asian immigration, wonders about the value of caregivers coming to Canada to live with their own families — and he recognizes “the vast majority try to get out of the LCP as soon as they can.”
All in all, though, Laquian believes the LCP has brought a host of friendly, hard-working Englishspeaking immigrants to Canada. Even while most caregivers would not qualify to come to Canada under any other category, Laquian believes “it’s good for Canada to have immigrants who come in at the bottom of the ladder.”
Still, a range of stakeholders are raising several issues about the LCP including whether the program contributes to poor educational and workplace performances; subsidizes affluent families; means lowers wages for Canadians; unnecessarily hurts the Philippines and should be replaced with an “au pair” program.