Talk delivered at McGill University during IWD – Mar. 10, 2008
Cecilia Diocson
National Alliance of Philippine Women in Canada (NAPWC)

Once More on Canada’s Live-in Caregiver Program

March 10, 2008

It is interesting to note that, the Live-in Caregiver Program or LCP for short has now gotten the attention of more women outside the Filipino community for “critical discussion.”   In the past, discussions on the LCP had been mainly confined among advocacy groups, in the academic research community or at parliamentary hearings and briefing rooms.

 As a long advocate for the scrapping of this anti–woman and racist program, I hope that today’s forum would not be the last in seriously looking at this program and its negative impact in the lives of women under this program, their families and their community.  We should also seriously see how this program divides women and Canadian society as a whole.

Some of us here must have heard the story of Laila Elumbra, a former domestic worker who came to Canada under this program.  When she got sick and became bedridden and unable to meet the 24-month requirement for permanent residency, Citizenship and Immigration Canada immediately ordered her deportation. She failed to meet the requirement by two months, not because she willfully violated it but because of circumstances beyond her control. She did not choose to get sick after working for 22 months – 2 months shy of the LCP requirement for landed status application.  That Laila was eventually granted landed status on humanitarian and compassionate grounds, only proved the arbitrariness and lack of protection for women under the LCP.

Just yesterday afternoon, a domestic worker came to the Philippine Women Centre of Quebec and shared her story of having to work 84 hours a week taking care of a woman in her 80s who is suffering from a debilitating Alzheimer disease and needs 24 hour home support.  She works for minimum wage without over time pay. She is made to feel grateful because she has a chance of eventually becoming a Canadian immigrant.  And she had been separated from her two kids and husband for over two years now.

The above cases show how the LCP puts women in a very vulnerable and precarious situation.  Having temporary workers status and subject to immediate deportation upon non-completion of contract, these women have practically no rights as workers and as women in this country, despite the contributions that they make while working.

A critical look at the Live-on Caregiver Program

Developed and implemented in 1992, the LCP is the latest development in Canada’s continuing program of recruiting foreign women to work as domestic workers and cheap labour since over 100 years ago.  There had been various schemes that changed over time such as the Caribbean program which brings in women from the Caribbean in the 1950s and 1960s, the Temporary Employment Act (TEA) in the 1970s and the Foreign Domestic Movement (FDM) in 1981.  From an ad hoc scheme of bringing in these foreign women to do domestic work, this practice was finally given legislative approval with the LCP becoming part of the Immigration Regulation Protection Act (IRPA) in 1992. 

In our research and advocacy work, we found strong evidence of the failure of the LCP to look at the equality and human rights of these people.  There is therefore, the need to critically look at the LCP as a program that brings in women from other countries under temporary status and as cheap labour to take on the work that Canadians would not ordinarily do.

In a continuing legal research that we are conducting right now, we see the importance of placing the LCP and its predecessor programs within the conceptual foundations of Canadian immigration law.  Canadian immigration law only recognizes two types of foreigners who seek entry into Canada: immigrants and visitors.  Immigrants seek to enter Canada on a permanent basis, but visitors come for only temporary periods to Canada.  A foreign domestic worker therefore, is an anomaly in the Canadian immigration scheme because she “occupies the technically non-existent category of ‘visiting immigrant.’” She is neither an immigrant nor a visitor. The contradictory position occupied by these women is key to understanding their legal status within Canadian society.

Prof.  Gerry Pratt of the University of British Columbia’s Geography Department had written in one of her research papers on domestic workers that the modern nation-state, like Canada, “establishes sovereign power at the moment that it produces legal abandonment”  among some people within its territorial space. We take this to mean that non-citizens like the women under the LCP, are required to pay taxes and perform other obligations under Canadian sovereignty but have no or very restricted legal rights for redress of grievances.  The state leaves no space for imagining the human outside of citizenship.  These women could therefore be considered as existing outside the frame of Canadian society; are abandoned in a figurative zone and are rendered as “bare life”, as not human in a fully social sense, because they are not citizens. They are therefore expendable yet useful to the extent that they contribute their capacity to work and their bodies for the benefit of the nation-state.  This is nothing but modern-day slavery.

Functional to capital

The LCP must be viewed through the prism of today’s neo-liberal globalization and its accompanying economic and political dynamics. With general profitability in the global economy greatly reduced, there is today the pressure to keep wages as low as possible and to raise the productivity of workers as high as possible. 

In advanced capitalist countries like Canada, one source of cheap labour is still the women – especially those who are bound at home.  But in order to get them out to work outside the home, there has to be someone who would look after the children and other household chores. And with the current privatization of our health care,  someone has also to care for the elderly and people with disability.  These workers have to be willing to accept the minimum wage for longer hours of work in an unsupervised setting of a private home.  And the only people who are willing or forced to do this, are the women from underdeveloped countries.  Hence, the phenomenon of live-in caregiver work. 

Also, in Canada and other capitalist countries, wages are relatively higher compared to wages in underdeveloped countries like the Philippines. The present arrangement of the international division of labor shows that workers from underdeveloped countries provide cheap labor for advanced capitalist countries.  It is also mainly in advanced capitalist countries where most surplus and profits go.  This gives these countries the relative advantage for certain job creation and other economic activities that attract migrants and immigrants. 

With the above as the context, the LCP is a program where one finds the intersection of class (migrant workers), gender (women) and race (people of color).

•    As a class issue, the LCP creates a pool of cheap labor that contributes to pulling down the general wage rates of workers. This is one reason why Canadians are not willing to do these jobs.
•    As a gender or woman issue, the LCP is basically anti-woman as it relegates women to cheap labor and long working hours. It divides women where you have one group of women - mostly white, middle and upper class- living off the cheap labor of another group of women. As migrant workers, they are generally paid much lower wages than citizens and are constrained to work beyond the mandated 8 to 10 hours a day because of their “lived in” and temporary workers status.
•    As a race issue, the LCP is a racist program with mostly women of color taking on these jobs. At the moment, these jobs are concentrated among Filipino women who constitute over 96% of domestic workers who came under this program.
•    The  nature of domestic work and the stiff requirements for personal growth and self-improvement under the LCP set the conditions for de-skilling and underdevelopment of these women.
•    With LCP workers doing child care, there is less pressure for the Canadian state to implement a universal childcare program. Their employers in turn use the wages of their LCP workers as tax deductions.  This is part of the privatization process of social programs including our health care system.  Hence, the LCP is functional to Canadian capitalism.

Raising the issue

The theme of this panel which is “Opening the Doors to Rights for Live-in Caregivers” is not a simple proposition as one would like it to be. Our studies among our network members at the National Alliance of Philippine in Canada, show that the LCP goes right into the core of class, gender and race issues with all their implications.  As advocates for women rights and liberation in a largely patriarchal, racialized and class society, it is not enough to understand legal niceties about rights and obligations for these women in Canada. This is a narrow and condescending view of these women. 

Prof. Gerry Pratt, in one of her works, mentioned of the two ways in which we in Canada unwittingly transfer framings of the Philippines and Canada that repeat conventional ways of knowing.  The first one is casting the Philippines as a horrific country from which to flee. Filipino women under the LCP should therefore, be happy and grateful to Canada. This is falling into the framework of humanitarianism, in which the Philippines is cast as monstrous and Canada as a refuge that is preferable under any conditions, including servitude outside of the legal protections of citizenship.

The other one, is to treat these migrant workers as people without history and merely as “objects of intellectual and political activism thereby asserting the centrality and superiority of the metropolis like Canada and the irrelevance of all places and social relations that lie outside it.” For some activists in Canada, the women under the LCP and their issues are therefore only a passing phase in their social and political activism.  It is a “flavor of the month” for their activism and not as a major component of the struggle for social and women liberation. 

Of course, the reality is that women under the LCP are here because of the dynamics of global capitalism in which Canada is a major player.  Their cheap labor are much needed in Canada as anywhere else because they serve to help maintain the present neo-liberal global economic system.  Thus, “the histories of Canada and the Philippines are far more intertwined, and domestic workers and their families experience ongoing transnational lives in part because the Canadian government has structured them to be this way.” 

Reform or scrap the LCP

There are currently two positions on how we should look at the LCP.  There is the position that we should reform the LCP and make it more “humane” and observant of Canada’s values of human rights and charity. Domestic workers are made to feel grateful to the program for giving them the chance to be here in Canada.  The program is basically good and needs only some changes and reforms.

The other position is altogether to scrap the whole program and accept these women under landed status as immigrants.  I have just discussed that the whole program itself is anti-woman, racist and anti-worker.  We believe that you cannot reform what is basically a program that has been framed this way.  A program that is meant to serve the interests of the few at the expense and exploitation of the many who happen to be women at the same time. And furthermore, these are women of colour who have little choices in their countries of origin and are therefore virtually forced to migrate in order to survive and help their families.

To the panel’s question therefore, whether the LCP is an appropriate solution to the childcare crisis in Canada, our answer is a resounding No.  The LCP as presently structured delays, if not altogether prevent, the successful integration of these women in Canada. Our gesture of solidarity is to support the campaign to scrap the LCP and let these women come, not as temporary workers, but as immigrants.  Then, together and with raise fists,  we should campaign for universal child care and to stop the privatization of our health care system.

March 10, 2008
McGill University
Montreal, Quebec

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