If Justin Trudeau truly espouses ‘Feminist’ ideals, he will support family reunification for caregivers
For decades, Canada has recruited women from abroad to provide care for children, seniors, and individuals with disabilities, promising these women Canadian citizenship at the end of their two-year contracts. ‘Take care of us and then we can give you and family citizenship,’ is the promise Canada makes to caregivers under the Live-in Caregiver Program. This has created undue hardship for caregivers, many of whom withstood adverse living and working conditions in order to attain Canadian citizenship. Yet for many, this policy at least allowed them to enter the country. It wasn’t perfect but it was something.
Except that in recent years, Canada has reneged on its side of the bargain. In 2014, the Caregiver Program severely limited the numbers of caregivers who could qualify for permanent residency. And in 2017, there are 44, 000 permanent residency applications that are in the queue, with an average processing time of 53 months for live-in caregivers according to Citizenship and Immigration Canada’s own calculations.
Needless to say, such long processing times have negatively impacts. Jocelyn, a caregiver I met at a press conference organized by NDP Immigration critic Jenny Kwan held on July 20, 2017, spoke about the difficulties of living apart from her family. She first worked in Hong Kong and then arrived in Canada in 2008 under the Live-in Caregiver Program. She filed her permanent residency application in 2010, and has yet to hear back from CIC. Her daughter, who was ten when she left and is now 23, told her that she no longer believes Jocelyn’s promises that they will be able to live together again. Jocelyn mentioned that the hardest part about her job is that she is “taking care of other kids but [she] can’t take care of [her] own.” In all the time she worked abroad, she has only seen her family three times.
Although I have long worked on caregivers and migrant workers’ issues, it was only when I became a mom in 2016 that I fully grasped the extent of the sacrifice made by caregivers. Despite technological advances, they do not get to witness key milestones in their children’s lives. It was hard enough for me to leave my baby for a week on a work-related trip. But to leave your children indefinitely, with no precise end date in sight? That is a hardship that caregivers can only withstand out of economic necessity.
I truly expected that a feminist Prime Minister like Justin Trudeau would understand and be sympathetic to the issues facing caregivers. Exactly why the Liberal government has done very little to address the issues facing caregivers confounds me. When campaigning in 2015, Trudeau and other Liberal party candidates reached out to different immigrant communities promising that they will do something on their behalf, that “sunny ways” were ahead, that many of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s measures were “un-Canadian.”
Many candidates condemned the restrictions that the Harper government placed to the caregiver program, which imposed new language and licensing requirements and quotas that made it harder for caregivers to acquire permanent residency. A few candidates told me that they also had to rely on the labour of caregivers. One Liberal MP even informed me that she relied on the caregiver program because the erratic schedule of being an MP meant that putting her kids in daycare was out. And so, like many migrant advocates, I believed what the Liberal government was selling. Theirs would be a humane government that understands the difficulties caregivers withstand. Indeed, the fact that Trudeau himself has relied on the caregiver program to take care of his children seemed to show that he would be particularly attune to caregivers’ needs.
Thus far, this has not been the case. Reforms to the Temporary Foreign Workers Program – of which the Caregiver Program is a part – have mostly been skewed in favour of employers’ interests. If Trudeau and the Liberal government were to show that they were truly interested in ushering “sunny ways” and in making Canada a truly inclusive country, then they would expedite the processing of caregivers’ permanent residency applications as soon as possible. To continue to keep caregivers apart from their children for decades is simply cruel.
