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—