Sometimes when you are driving by a park you’ll catch a glimpse of brown-skinned women weighted with the responsibility of caring for white-skinned children. Their own governments are happy to see them go—better to export poverty than perpetuate it at home. And Ottawa, forever lacking a national child-care policy, has been only too willing to tap into this vast pool of cheap, desperate labour—after all, our baby boomers needed the help. But now the nannies to the country’s richest generation are demanding a quicker route to citizenship and protection from abusive employers. Will they receive it?
Flickering candles cast a pale glow on the tiny, dark-haired woman kneeling in front of a small statue of the Virgin. “God give me strength,” Kristina murmurs in front of the makeshift altar, her thumb moving unconsciously through a rosary dangling from her right hand. “Hail Mary, full of grace,” she continues as a door slams shut down the hall. Her prayers interrupted, she turns on a bare overhead light revealing the gray concrete walls of her tiny room in the basement of a mansion in central Vancouver. Moving to her bed, she sits with her back against the cold wall, draws her knees to her chest, closes her eyes and runs through her chores for the next day—get the five kids to and from school, take the youngest to the doctor, clean six bedrooms, do four loads of laundry, and prepare a casserole dinner for eight. “God,” she begins praying again, “just help me get everything done.”
She tries to sleep, but the whir of the furnace just a few feet from her bed keeps her awake and finally she reaches for a half-finished blanket of red, yellow, and blue wool and knits late into the night. Kristina, twenty-six, came to Canada in 1999 under Ottawa’s controversial Live-in Caregiver Program, an initiative that has lured tens of thousands of women to Canada from impoverished countries over the last twenty-five years. As so many in the developing world have done before them, these young women left, or, more accurately, were forced to leave, the security of family for the promise of a more prosperous life in the West. If years of hardship can be endured after their arrival, they may even reach their ultimate goal and be given citizenship and the right to rescue their relatives from poverty by bringing them to Canada.
Unlike wealthy foreigners who can purchase Canadian passports simply by making an investment in Canada or highly educated immigrants who receive landed immigrant status on arrival, women like Kristina are told to line up at Canada’s back door. They will not be given landed status—essentially citizenship—on arrival and will be admitted only if they agree to work for a minimum of two years as live-in nannies. On the surface that may not seem so bad: two years of servitude in exchange for a Canadian passport. Even the low wages—about $700 a month after room and board—may seem adequate to many. And besides, don’t nannies eat the same meals, watch television, and go on vacations with the families they’re living with?
Many are no doubt happy doing just that, but after more than two decades in operation, according to politicians on both sides of the House of Commons, the Live-in program has a darker side, one that has exploited impoverished women from around the globe and must be reformed. It has now come under formal scrutiny by Citizenship and Immigration Canada, and several studies cast a disturbing light on the baby boomers—the richest generation in Canadian history—who employed most of the women. During a period when individual rights were enshrined in law, and women, finally freed from the kitchen and the nursery, entered the workforce in numbers almost equalling their male counterparts, many of the nannies were suffering physical and mental abuse at the hands of the very people they had liberated from the routine drudgery of family life.
An advertisement placed by an Internet auction house in the Montreal Gazette in 2003 is an extreme case, but underscores both the vulnerability of the nannies and the contempt in which they are often held. The auctioneers wanted to offer up the services of three nannies to the highest bidder, generating a heated debate on the floor of the House of Commons where politicians called for a drastic overhaul of the Live-in program. At the same time, many nannies came forward with stories of abuse, and crushingly long hours of work with very little pay. Others compared attempts to auction the women to a more painful time in history. “Foreign domestic workers have become Canada’s modern-day slaves,” says Evelyn Calugay of pinay, a Montreal-based advocacy group for Filipina women. “I would call it trafficking in humans.”
Such public demonstrations of outrage are rare. Many nannies suffer quietly in isolation, often cowed into silence by employers who threaten them with deportation and calls to the police. Kristina, for one, had no one to turn to when her employer refused to pay her nearly $3,000 in back pay. There was more to this debt than money owed for work done. She would soon be eligible for landed-immigrant status. If granted, it would allow her to find employment other than as a live-in nanny and move her a step closer to bringing family members to Canada—one of the main reasons she came to this country in the first place. But federal immigration authorities wanted $1,500 to process her application—money she didn’t have. “My employer couldn’t pay me, the person she trusted to care for her children,” she laments. “But she could afford to pay the swimming pool clean and stock her bar full of liquor.”
In 1993, 57 percent of workers in the Caregiver Program were from the Philippines. That figure rose to 93 percent by 2002, an increase that can largely be attributed to the complementary relationship between Ottawa’s determination to find a source of cheap labour to provide daycare, and the Philippines’ draconian labour export policy, a controversial government initiative under which Filipinos are encouraged to work overseas and send money home.
The export of impoverished Filipinos to richer countries began in the 1970s as Manila looked for ways to reduce unemployment and diversify the economy beyond rice and sugar-cane farming. Banks were encouraged to loan individuals money to go abroad, and fly-by-night employment agencies promoting foreign contacts soon opened in cities and villages across the country. Today females are the principal export, and in 1998 Filipinas working abroad sent almost $8 billion home.
While the Philippines’ economy improved with the inflow of foreign earnings, Ottawa in turn could boast that it had provided the baby boomers with a program to help them raise their families while allowing both spouses to work. “The Philippines has generated this new hero,” says Audrey Macklin, a law professor at the University of Toronto and former member of the Immigration and Refugee Board. “The Filipina woman is seen as the migrant worker who is lifting their country out of poverty. In Canada, the Filipina woman is seen as the domestic worker who has come to the family’s rescue.”
