In pursuit of the elusive PR
By Faye Arellano
After several failed attempts to restore her legal status even with the help of a lawyer, Maria eventually became undocumented in 2014.
“I incurred so much debts in the course of my legal battle, to no avail,” recalled Maria. She added that she was desperate to renew her work permit and she kept looking for a new employer willing to sponsor her until she ran out of time.
Due to lack of financial resources to pursue other legal means to regain her status, Maria had no choice but to work in the shadows taking on menial jobs. She cleaned houses to fend for herself, pay her debts and support her family abroad.
Caregivers lose their legal status for a number of reasons. In most cases, their permanent residence (PR) application is refused because they fail to meet the two-year work experience requirement within the prescribed time. This was what happened in Maria’s case.
Some caregivers are deemed inadmissible because of medical issues; misrepresentation or criminal inadmissibility of a husband or other dependents.
Others are refused for mere errors in filling out the PR application form.
“They fail to follow instructions because they are unsure about the stream that they are under,” according to Loida Gatchalian, a settlement counsellor at the Kababayan Multicultural Centre in Toronto.
Over the years, the caregiver program has gone through multiple changes. At one point in time, there were a mishmash of at least six streams of caregiver program making it difficult for caregivers to navigate the process of applying for PR.
The Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP); The Caring for Children Program; Caring for People with High Medical Needs Program; The Interim Pathway for Caregivers; Home Child Care Provider and the Home Support Worker Pilot Programs proved to be very confusing to a lot of caregivers. These mostly pilot programs were likely creating a major bureaucratic problem as well.
Under the defunct LCP, foreign caregivers were provided an automatic pathway to permanent residence in Canada in exchange for taking a job which only few Canadians were willing to take up.
Many of these foreign caregivers left their own families abroad to take care of Canadian families in hopes that the pathway to permanence would lead to a brighter future.
Taking care of children; doing household chores; caring for elderly and people with disabilities were just some of the jobs done by caregivers, who also had to live with their employers.
In 2014, the LCP was lumped into the Foreign Temporary Work Program stream. Since then, the universal access to PR for caregivers to build a new life in Canada became elusive to some and almost impossible to many.
Two new pilot programs called Caring for Children Program and Caring for People with High Medical Needs Program, were introduced by then Conservative government in November of 2014. These two pilot programs eliminated the live-in work requirement, but imposed two new standards- education and language- for caregivers to qualify to apply for their PR.
Under the 2014 pilot programs, caregivers must have an equivalent of one-year post-secondary education in Canada and must pass a Level 5 language proficiency to qualify to apply for PR.
With a yearly cap of 5,500 for both programs, the two pilots effectively slashed the number of caregivers who could apply for their PR.
An average of 10,740 caregivers and their families were granted their PR annually since 2006. But by 2017, only about 1,955 caregivers and their dependants received their PR.
A new financial barrier for employers was also introduced.
The Labour Market Opinion was replaced by Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) and the fee, paid by employers, increased from $250.00 to $1,000.00.
The four-years-in and four-years-out regulation also meant that caregivers had to leave Canada when they failed to become permanent residents within the prescribed time.
Caregiver advocates called the changes harsh and warned that it would expose caregivers to precarious situation if they fail to obtain their PR.
In 2019, when the Liberal government introduced the Home Child Care Provider and Home Support Worker Pilot Programs, the contentious LMIA requirement for issuing work permit was scrapped. An occupation-specific work permit replaced the earlier employer-specific permit, which had been blamed for placing many caregivers at the mercy of abusive employers.
Under the new pilots, participants and their families are also pre-screened for PR at the outset. This meant that after successful completion of the two-year work experience, caregivers would automatically receive their PR and be reunited with their families in Canada.
This all sounded good on paper. However, the reality on the group showed a different picture.
The language and education eligibility requirements have remained the same. These two requirements, legacies of the 2014 Conservative ministerial instruction which caused untold anxiety and burden to some caregivers, continued to hamper the quest for PR status.
In fact, there are numerous stories of caregivers who lost their legal status precisely because of these two stringent requirements.
Some caregiver advocates maintain that these two requirements are unrelated to the ability of the caregivers to perform their jobs.
Take the case of Imelda. The 31-year-old is preparing for her language exam by self-studying after work. It would be her second time to take the $339 required test. She failed the first exam because she felt intimidated and was anxious because of the time pressure.
“It was very stressful and, at times during the exam, my mind just went blank,” she said.
She passed the benchmark of Level 5 in listening, speaking and writing, but failed the reading part.
She has to take all four parts of the test when she takes her second exam.
“Why can’t they just allow me to take the reading part instead of going through the three-hour exam again?” she asked.
In the meantime, the clock keeps ticking and Imelda is on a race to pass the language requirement within a year or so.
There are caregivers who try to enroll in a one-year college program to meet the education requirement, but they are finding the cost very prohibitive. Like other foreign students, caregivers have to pay double the amount that regular students pay. Most of caregivers earn just a little over the minimum wage.
Even to have their credentials assessed, caregivers have to fork out hundreds of dollars from their own pockets to pay the exorbitant fees.
The current caregiver pilot programs may prevent participants from losing legal status in the long run as they are pre-screened for PR eligibility prior to their arrival in Canada. But since the programs were launched, most of the participants have yet to set foot in Canada. According to the Toronto Star, only five applications were processed since 2019.
The Covid-19 pandemic has put the brakes on the arrival of foreign workers to Canada. And this is creating a shortage of essential workers, including caregivers.
During this pandemic, when no foreign caregivers are arriving, the government should seriously consider implementing an amnesty program to put the undocumented caregivers back on track.
The argument for this strategy is that these caregivers are already here. They also have the work experience and could readily fill the gaps in labour shortages.
These caregivers with lapsed work permit should be able to work legally and safely, if only Canada gives them a second chance.