Status of Women Committee on April 19th, 2007

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Committee members, welcome.

We are continuing our study on the economic security of women.

We have with us Dr. Janet Fast, who is the coordinator of research on aging policies and practices. We also have Sheila Konanur of the AWIC Community and Social Services and Cecilia Diocson from the National Alliance of Philippine Women in Canada.

We will start off with Sheila.

I've spoken to all of you. You have ten minutes to present, but if you wish to take less time, this will give the committee members more of an opportunity to question you.

We would like to finish off at five o'clock, because we have a report to go through.

Ms. Konanur, please start. Thank you.

[Sheila Konanur, Settlement Counsellor, AWIC Community and Social Services]

Good afternoon, everyone.

Your committee has recognized that immigrant women have been identified as a particularly vulnerable group with regard to economic security. I want to thank all of you for providing me and my fellow service providers the opportunity to speak about this issue. I will do my best to give these women the voice they so desperately need to achieve empowerment and greater mobilization toward success in Canada.

Let me begin by providing you with some context around AWIC. AWIC Community and Social Services began thirty years ago as an agency helping South Asian women. Since that time, it has evolved to render settlement, employment, and support services to women and their families regardless of culture, class, or creed. AWIC is a relatively small agency with only three front-line staff. Community and newcomer volunteers supplement our skeleton staff and enable us to provide the services and programs that we're able to.

AWIC's greatest strength is our ability to create a welcoming and familial environment for individuals accessing our services. In doing this, we are able to connect with immigrant women one-on-one and provide ongoing support. Many of the immigrant women we support come from cultures where it is atypical to seek advice outside of their family unit. This taboo mentality lends itself to a lot of suffering in silence. Therefore, a great deal of emphasis is placed on making women feel safe and comfortable enough to seek our help. By fostering a trusting relationship with individual women, we are able to address their needs holistically.

I am employed at AWIC as a counsellor with the primary responsibility of assisting immigrants in the area of settlement and advocating on their behalf.

On a personal level, I am a Canadian-born child of immigrant parents who came here in the 1970s. As such, I work hard to really empathize with the experiences of immigrant women, and I even reflect upon the struggles that my own mother had to face when I was growing up. Although that was around twenty years ago, I see some of my mother's struggles mirrored in the lives of the immigrant women I help today, and I realize that there is still room for improvement.

Another key point I would like to convey is that immigrant women are not a homogenous group. For example, in a given week I may work with women who are refugee claimants, women experiencing a sponsorship breakdown, women who are needy seniors, women who have sought help due to an inability to navigate the Canadian system, women who are in abusive situations, or women who lack social support.

Conversely, there are a number of immigrant women who arrive in Canada with more than adequate qualifications and foreign credentials, and with good family support, but who are just unable to secure employment.

From our perspective, economic security cannot be resolved with one-stop solutions. It is essential that we employ a multi-dimensional approach in order to overcome barriers to economic security faced by immigrant women. One aspect of this approach must be to make the provision of culturally sensitive services a priority. What this means is that we may have to re-evaluate certain assumptions related to economic security upon which Canadian policy is based.

For example, two types of investments are RRSPs and RESPs. It is assumed that because we have these programs to help individuals, the individuals themselves will seek them out, but this is not the case. Many immigrant women are unable to grasp the benefits of these programs, because they're simply not aware of them. Immigrant women are more likely to work for low wages and are less likely to be high earners. Therefore, they are not able to participate in such programs, and when they do, they are not able to meet minimum payment levels to benefit from additional government grants towards RESPs. For example, if a family income is below approximately $38,000, the family can receive a government grant of 40¢ for every dollar on the first $500 saved in the child's RESP. However, many of the immigrant women we see are not even able to save $500. If the initial payment were lower or even half that, they could perhaps just meet the minimum and receive some of the benefits of this program.

As service providers, it is vital that we hone our focus on a strategy to increase our visibility amongst this population of women and let them know how many services we have to help them.

Our meeting today must address two points. First, why are immigrant women not accessing the services currently available to them? Second, what inherent flaws exist in our current system, and how can they be modified to target this marginalized group?

The first we see is the language barrier. Many of the women I see have poor verbal and written English proficiency. This inability to communicate stunts their potential for financial success.

Upon arriving in Canada, it should be made clear that learning one of the national languages must be mandatory—not an option. Alternatively, an incentive could be given to those individuals who enroll in LINC. This could greatly resolve problems of exploitation, long-term dependency on social welfare, lack of participation in the labour market, and even social isolation. For example, Canadian citizens and refugee claimants are not eligible to attend LINC. Only some LINC centres provide child-minding services, but there are waiting lists for that.

Eligibility criteria restricting immigrant women's access to this program must be re-evaluated. All efforts should be made to encourage immigrant women to access and benefit from the acquisition of a national language. Communication with immigrant women can be maximized by ensuring that information is available in translation, as well as clear language and design formats. It could be beneficial to make services multilingual. For example, you could have on-site interpretation wherever it's possible.

Secondly, there's parental burden. The fact that parental burden most often falls on the shoulders of the woman has a great impact on her economic security. I have met with women who simply forgo attempts to find employment for lack of an ability to find cost-effective child care.

They may find that their move to Canada has required them to upgrade their qualifications, but they are unable to attend school because of waiting lists for a child care subsidy. Tax credits given to businesses to create licensed child care spaces for their employees will not help these women.

A national child care strategy that takes into consideration the unique needs of immigration women is necessary. The absence of a national child care strategy and the lack of affordable child care has its greatest impact on low- to middle-income families and affects female labour market participation.

Third is gender inequality. It is common for many immigrant families, upon arriving in Canada, to gravitate and settle in their cultural communities. The reason behind this is to help them maintain a sense of back home and build social networks. While choosing to live in these cultural enclaves can be beneficial, there are real disadvantages.

Among our clients, we have seen cultural pressures that often discourage immigrant women's economic autonomy. As a result, these women become financially dependent on their spouses, and they might also arrive in Canada lacking the skill sets that would assist them in securing employment. Our recommendation is that organizations that are working toward combating such intra-cultural pressures and equipping women with the tools to achieve financial independence must be recognized.

Fourth is labour market participation. The 2007 budget mentions efforts that will be put toward upgrading worker skills by measures under the Canada-Ontario labour market agreements. Training programs under the labour market development agreements are available only to those workers who can demonstrate their labour market attachment, as per the provisions of the Employment Insurance Act.

Most female immigrants working in the contingent non-standard sector are not eligible for these training programs. The labour market partnership agreements, which name immigrants as a priority target population, have not entered into force yet, as there are reportedly no funds assigned to implementation. We recommend that funding be available to begin implementation.

Fifth is survival jobs, or what we think of as “pay cheque to pay cheque reality”. AWIC believes that a soft loan facility should be made available for people to easily upgrade their skills, so they can become contributing members of the Canadian economy. Lower interest rates mean that people would not get trapped in low-paying survival jobs. It doesn't seem logical that people are given the opportunity to come to Canada based on their skills and then not afforded the means to enable them to use those skills.

In addition, the 2007 budget also stated that there would be a foreign credential recognition, now branded foreign credential referrals, which would complement the existing initiatives of the province. It is our understanding that there's been no movement in the creation of this agency.

In conclusion, I'd like to say that it is essential that we examine a method for better conversion of immigrant women's training and skills into actual use. They cannot contribute to economic growth unless this process is made easier.

In sum, I don't believe funding is the only answer. We also require a paradigm shift in the way that we approach this issue. It lies in a continuum of available integrated services that will recognize all the factors that will contribute to an immigrant woman's economic security.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you very much.

We'll now go for ten minutes to Ms. Cecilia Diocson.

[Cecilia Diocson, Executive Director, National Alliance of Philippine Women in Canada]

Thank you.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks again for inviting the National Alliance of Philippine Women in Canada to talk to you about our conditions as a member of Canadian society and as a member of the Filipino community here in Canada.

The National Alliance of Philippine Women in Canada, formed in March 2002, is a national alliance of Philippine Canadian community organizations in Canada. Through more than 16 years of community-organized education and community economic development work, our member organizations have raised the voices, experiences, and struggles of Filipino women in the community in Canada with helping hands, successful settlement integration, and economic security, to resist economic, social, and political marginalization and inequality.

Network members of the NAPWC include groups and organizations from major cities of Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Winnipeg, and Vancouver. These groups come from various sectors of the communities—women, youth and students, nurses' groups, immigrants and migrants and their temporary status. The NAPWC seeks to empower Filipino women in the community to understand the roots of the barriers they face as immigrants, visible minority women, and marginalized workers and to collectively assert their continuing efforts for human rights, genuine equality, peace, and development in Canadian society.

As a community of immigrant women and visible minority women, a key part of our work concerns immigration and other government policies that address our economic issues, settlement, and integration in a multicultural society. Aside from doing community-based and self-initiated studies into the impact of Canada's immigration policies on Filipino women and the community, we also conduct education toward empowerment and engagement in the public policy process. We also advocate and lobby for specific policy changes in immigration and other areas that aim to improve the collective situation of Filipino women and the community.

In the past, we have presented our analysis and position to various standing committees of Parliament, particularly the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, where we submitted the only brief on the live-in caregiver program, or LCP. We also have lobbied other government agencies and elected officials and submitted research papers to community-based and academic conferences and public forums. Through the effort of its network member, the Philippine Women Centre of B.C., NAPWC is making this presentation today before the Standing Committee on the Status of Women.

Since the late 1960s, there has been a dramatic increase in the numbers of Filipinos in Canada. It is estimated that the Filipinos in Canada now number over 400,000. The community has grown by more than 31% since the census of 1996. Overall, Filipinos are now the fourth-largest visible minority population in Canada. The census statistics also showed that the Philippines is the third source country of immigrants arriving in Canada in the last ten years. Until the early part of the 1970s, Canada directly recruited many Filipino women to work in health care, education, and other areas as teachers, nurses, and other professionals to meet its need for skilled labour shortage. As such, early Filipino women immigrants were an indispensable part of the growth of the Canadian economy.

To illustrate this, many Filipino women worked in remote areas, including many first nations reserves, because Canadian nurses and teachers would not work there. Later on, a large number of Filipino women were also directly recruited to work in Manitoba's garment industry. Many of these women have moved on to achieve a certain level of economic security. They are able to work in their profession of choice because at that time their foreign education and training were recognized upon arrival in Canada. A dramatic rise in the arrival of Filipino women into Canada occurred in the implementation of the foreign domestic movement in 1981 and its subsequent successor, the live-in caregiver program or LCP, in 1992. This program regulated and institutionalized the entry of women to work as foreign domestic workers under temporary working status for a period of several years.

Studies show that the majority—approximately 65%—of the Filipino community in Canada is made up of women. We call this disproportionality of women in relation to men in our community the feminization of Filipino migration. Unlike like past migration, where men usually came ahead of their families, today it is women who come first, and sponsor their families after they qualify to do so.

Close to one-third of the Filipino community in Canada has entered under the live-in caregiver program and its predecessor program, the FDM. In 2005, according to the statistics from the Canadian embassy in Manila, Filipino women made up 95.6% of live-in caregivers in Canada, even as they constituted only 2.2% of all Filipino domestic workers working outside the Philippines. This unusually large number of Filipino women in the LCP shows how much Canada benefits from the labour export program of the Philippines, and how effective Canada's live-in caregiver program is in providing relatively inexpensive childcare, care for the elderly and people with disabilities, and other domestic work.

This policy of importing live-in caregivers is the direct result of women in Canada moving into the workforce. When women in industrialized countries leave the home to work, hiring a nanny or live-in caregiver becomes an affordable option for most middle- and upper-class families. At the same time, Canada remains reluctant to implement a national child care policy, choosing instead to address the social responsibility of child care by providing this option for families who can afford live-in caregivers.

The implementation of FDM perfectly corresponded to the escalation of the Philippine government's labour export policy. The LCP replaced the FDM in 1992 and remains the official Canadian government program for live-in caregivers. Although live-in caregiver organizations, including Filipino women's groups, have publicly engaged for changes to the program that made it more difficult for women from developing countries to migrate—such as higher educational and training requirements--they also criticize the fundamental pillars of the programs that perpetuate the exploitation and economic insecurity of these women.

Many Filipino women live-in caregivers face long hours, low wages, physical and emotional abuse, deskilling, isolation, and low self-esteem. The program requires them to live in their employer's home 24 hours a day, which subjects them to work more than the mandated working hours; to come under temporary worker status, which makes them vulnerable to arbitrary deportation; and to have an employer-specific work permit that ties them down to a single employer at any time, making them vulnerable to abuse and arbitrary demands from their employer.

While championing itself as a defender of human rights, Canada ignores the numerous flagrant violations of these women's rights as workers and as women. In fact, Canada consistently ignores signing the United Nations International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families.

Studies on women and immigration have shown that at some point in their lives, immigrant women achieve a certain level of economic security and financial stability that helps facilitate successful settlement and integration into mainstream society. But this has eluded many Filipino women in Canada, who after toiling in mainly low-paying, domestic, and dead-end service-sector jobs at minimum wage, continue to live on the margins of society, trapped as a segregated pool of cheap labour, despite their relatively high levels of foreign education and training.

A major factor of this economic insecurity is that many of these women have come through the live-in caregiver program, where the temporary nature of their status and the other requirements of the program set the conditions for their continuing low economic status and marginalization. For instance, the first two years under the program prevent these women from acquiring new skills or upgrading themselves. By the time they finish the program they have already lost their past professional and skills training, and are then streamed into similarly low-paying, dead-end jobs. You see many of these women working as care aids, and in janitorial and cleaning services. They are doing multiple jobs to earn decent incomes and raise their families.

The other major factor is the non-recognition of foreign education and training. Whether they come—

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

You'll have to wrap up, but you can conclude. Thank you.

[Cecilia Diocson]

I would like to mention a few things about the Filipino community. Filipino nurses also come under this live-in caregiver program. We know that Canada is in dire need of nurses right now, so I think it is really important to stream the Filipino nurses under this program. Those who are here and already working under the program must be trained to go back to the nursing profession so we can alleviate the nursing crisis we have today and also for these women to achieve economic security in this country.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you.

We will go to Dr. Fast.

[Janet Fast, Co-Director, Research on Aging, Policies and Practice Research Program, Department of Human Ecology, University of Alberta, As an Individual]

Thank you very much for the opportunity to share with you what I know about how caregiving responsibilities are related to women's economic security.

As an applied economist who leads an international team that has grown to encompass some 70 researchers and policy and practice partners and who has devoted more than a decade to the study of the link between paid and unpaid work, it's become clear to me that care to family and friends in need can have profound implications for women's economic security.

In a few minutes all I can really do is leave you with a few key messages, and that probably is the key message, that in fact economic security absolutely can be threatened and is threatened by taking on care responsibilities. And that threat is greatest for women. But of course the full picture is much more complex than that.

The responsibilities we're talking about include care for children with and without disability and care for dependent adult family members and friends. The latter group includes both seniors and non-senior adults with chronic illness or disability, and that's where my major expertise lies, for the most part.

Consequences of taking on care responsibilities range fairly widely. They include social consequences—restrictions on social activities, holidays and vacations, and ultimately social isolation—health consequences, including sleep disruptions and deprivation, physical injury, fatigue, and burnout; and economic consequences deriving from out-of-pocket expenses and employment impacts.

Of course these categories of costs are not unrelated to one another either. Health consequences can affect the caregiver's ability to hold down a job or the person's performance on the job. Economic consequences can place additional stress on the caregiver and affect relationships with other family members and friends and the ability to participate in social and community activities, and so on.

There are more than 3.5 million Canadians providing care to someone with a long-term health or physical limitation. They provide in excess of 18 million hours of care to those individuals they are providing care to. It would take almost a half million full-time employed caregivers to do that work, at a cost in excess of $6 billion, if it had to be purchased. They are the mainstay of the health care and continuum care systems.

The majority of these caregivers are women, although it is not as big a majority as you might expect. Estimates range from a 40:60 split to 45:55 split, depending on which group of caregivers we're talking about.

But that's only a small part of the story on gender. Once women become caregivers, they also spend a great deal more time, overall, providing care. They provide help with more of the hands-on and inflexible tasks, such as personal care and housekeeping, and they're more likely to report virtually every type of consequence I've mentioned, with the interesting exception of guilt.

With respect to economic costs specifically, the best estimates are that between 40% and 50% of women caregivers make out-of-pocket expenditures that they would not have made otherwise if they hadn't taken on care responsibilities. The main items on which they spend this money include transportation, prescription and non-prescription medications and medical supplies, and equipment and homemaking supplies. According to one survey, almost one-quarter spent $300 or more per month on these extra items.

Between 30% and 50% of employed women caregivers change their work patterns, missing whole or part days of work, rescheduling or reducing their hours of work, working at home part time, and so on, specifically in order to accommodate their care responsibilities. Those providing end-of-life care are at the upper end of that 30% to 50%.

According to some estimates, as many as 22% of women caregivers quit work or retire early in order to provide care. In Britain, it was estimated that 25% of women stopped working to provide care. So this is an international phenomenon.

It is typically younger women with concurrent child care responsibilities and those caring for someone with a mental health problem who are most likely to quit a job to provide care and are most at risk.

Clearly these employment impacts affect women's economic security in both the short and long term in the form of reduced current wages, and we have estimated that the average loss of wealth from forgone earnings alone, at age 65, across all women in the labour force, ranges between $4,300 and $16,600 annually. As I said, this is across all women in the labour force, not just women caregivers, who are only 15% of all women. So the actual average is much higher than that. In one U.S. pilot study, lifetime wage losses for individual caregivers were estimated at in excess of $566,000 U.S.

Forgone employment benefits are also part of the cost of employment consequences—extended medical benefits, and the like.

Forgone pension benefits are often ignored. One British study found that fewer women who stopped work as a result of caring had employment-related pensions than other groups, and those who did have such pensions had accumulated fewer years of contributions than their counterparts who continued working. Of course, these outcomes have direct implications for pension benefits, once retired.

Women who have employment adjustments also forgo personal retirement investment opportunities. If you don't have the income, you can't invest it.

Moreover, one third of caregivers who reported employment consequences also reported that their work arrangements did not change once they finished caregiving. So the effects on employment are long term: they outlive the caregiving situation.

Another important part of this story is that more than 45% of women caregivers indicated that they had no choice but to provide the care that they were providing, either because they felt that it was a family responsibility, because there was no one else to do it, or significantly because home care services were unavailable or inadequate.

What does the future look like? It's likely to be both a good news and a bad news story. Medical, health promotion, and social advances mean that Canadians are living longer, and more are surviving what previously would have been fatal illness or injury and are reaching later life in better health, on average, than in previous generations. That said, we can expect the demand for care to continue to increase for some time yet, because it's the oldest old cohort that is increasing the fastest and this is the group that is most likely to require care.

How are these needs going to be met? Families are smaller and more geographically mobile, we're marrying and having children later in life, divorce and remarriage rates remain high, more women—the traditional carers—are holding down paid jobs, and more than ever these women are needed in the labour force. The current evidence suggests that this does not mean that we'll be less likely to engage as caregivers. Caregivers do not back away when the other demands in their lives go up, and they don't back away when supports are provided by the formal system. The evidence in fact suggests that most family and friend carers do so willingly, but it does mean that more of us will experience increasingly complex sets of competing demands and that we'll be more likely to encounter the kinds of consequences l've been describing, so finding the means to deal with them effectively is becoming even more critical.

There are presently very few public policies or programs that explicitly address the consequences of caregiving, in particular the economic consequences, and in particular for care other than child care. The few that do exist, notably the caregiver tax credit, and especially the compassionate care benefit, have had extremely limited success. Of particular concern is the lack of effort to address the longer term consequences, and the longer term economic consequences in particular, the loss of pension benefits, both public and private, and the ability to invest for one's own retirement. Also of concern is the fact that women caring for younger adults with chronic illness and disability are largely ignored in both research and policy. There's just a big black hole when it comes to caregivers to persons with disability between the ages of 18 and 65.

At the moment the stage is set for today's caregivers to become tomorrow's sick and poor seniors.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you very much.

We will go to the first round of questions, with Maria Minna. It's seven minutes for questions and answers, so in total it will be seven minutes.

Ms. Minna.

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

That was a fabulous presentation from all of you. I'm really very impressed, although I have to say that while it was a terrific presentation, I'm actually quite disheartened and depressed about it all. I was doing immigrant service programs for immigrant women—I started that in 1974 and stopped in 1992—and I don't hear a whole lot of change, not tremendously. That's really depressing in that context. We've changed, but we seem to be standing still in many ways when it comes to the issue of immigrant women.

With respect to the caregiver issue, I agree with Ms. Fast. What you have said is phenomenal, and of course, we are just beginning to deal with that issue. We haven't even acknowledged it properly.

I have a couple of questions for Ms. Konanur first.

You mentioned a couple of things. One was that no funds had been allocated yet for the immigrant training program. I presume you are talking about employment insurance, where if you're not part of the labour force you don't get training. The other portion has to do with the immigrant program, and no funds have yet been allocated to that, to the partnership program.

[Sheila Konanur]

What we know is that many immigrant women are employed in contingent or temporary seasonal types of work, so they're not eligible for the benefits and the training that are outlined in the employment insurance program. Additionally, I have come across this labour market partnership agreement that named immigrant women as a priority, but to my understanding, currently there are no funds assigned to support that.

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

So immigrant women are still on hold. That's something this committee should really take into consideration.

[Sheila Konanur]

That's right.

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

I agree with you.

The other thing is, I understand the LINC program reasonably well, but there are some limitations. Can you explain to me again what they are, because I'm not quite sure I caught that.

[Sheila Konanur]

What I was trying to get across was that there are many faces of immigrant women. Some are citizens. Some are refugees. Some are permanent residents. The LINC program restricts access for the participation of some portion of the immigrant women population, so that's something that needs to be re-evaluated. Why are citizens and refugee claimants not given an opportunity to learn English in that way?

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

That makes sense. Again, thank you. That's something that we should look at very carefully.

Also, I don't think that all of the LINC programs provide child minding, which is actually a major part of the success of that program, if I'm not mistaken.

[Sheila Konanur]

Right, and there are waiting lists as well, because it's in such high demand.

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Again, we shouldn't have waiting lists. If we bring immigrants to Canada we should make sure that they have the best possible start, because that benefits all of us. That's very true.

On the mandatory training for language, I agree with you. I've said this for some time. You wouldn't expect there to be any negative reaction towards that, would you?

[Sheila Konanur]

In my brief I go into an example of immigrant senior women who are coming here to help their families. Many people say, well, in that case, why do they need to learn language? They're just among their families; they're not really integrated into the society. But we come across a lot of these women who initially came here to help their families, and once their families realized they no longer needed their services, they kicked them out. Now they're here; they don't know the language. How are they able to do anything? They're not able to be economically secure in that sense.

The other thing I was really trying to convey is that just based on our experience, this is not an isolated problem. If you are you feeling isolated, if you're feeling depressed because you can't communicate with people, that's going to stunt your financial success.

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Sure. It makes sense. I understand that makes sense.

I'd like to go on to a few other things, but I also want to go to Ms. Diocson for a moment, if I could, with respect to the live-in caregivers.

I know the issue very well, and I understand it. I'm going to ask you some things to see whether you think they would work. I think you also made some of the same suggestions.

First of all, a lot of them are nurses. There is now a demand for nurses in our society. We have a shortage of professional nurses. First of all, could we not make sure that women coming from the Philippines no longer have to go through the live-in caregiver program? They should be able to apply through professional nursing. Those who are here could find a way to upgrade. Have you looked at some of that? It seems to me those are two solutions or two ways of looking at it.

On the third solution, if I can throw this at you, I think you alluded to it or mentioned it. The live-in program is a major problem because they're isolated. They don't get to take English as a second language. They can't do training.

Perhaps we could open up the box and have them not as live-in caregivers but as live-out caregivers. In other words, they're caregivers, but they'd actually go home to their apartments, to their sister's, or to whomever they're with at the end of the day. They wouldn't actually be trapped, and the employers wouldn't have that much power over them. It would seem to me that some of that might help tremendously. Would it be something that you would recommend to us?

[Cecilia Diocson]

Yes. I presented that the program started in 1981 and was changed in 1992. There are four pillars in this program that we really have to look at.

The first one is the mandatory live-in. You have a specific employer, and you have to work 24 months within a three-year period.

Another pillar is the temporary status. I think it's really important to look at this issue and, if they are important, the economic activities here in Canada, the labour market, and why the income is not the same as the income for those with permanent resident status.

Those nurses who are under this program should also be qualified as nurses instead of being recruited through the live-in caregiver program. They should come as nurses. In 1993 nurses were no longer given occupational points, meaning it's not an important profession for coming into Canada. That was taken away.

Because they're here working as live-in caregivers, they should be streamed away from this program and provided with training. Those who are able to go back to their professions should be given the opportunity to go back to their professions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Thank you.

Madam Demers, sept minutes.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Ms. Diocson, I have been listening to you, and I am a bit confused. Until 1992, nurses from the Philippines who wanted to emigrate to Canada could work here as nurses. Is that what you said?

[Cecilia Diocson]

Yes.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

In 1993, the government changed its policy, and even nurses could not come here and work in this capacity. Did the women who migrated here before 1992 to work as nurses integrate well in their community? Could they lead a normal life, own assets and hope to get a pension and enjoy the usual benefits of being a worker?