[van-announce] Open Letter to Canadian Ambassador to the Philippines, Robert Collette

[Philippine Women Centre of B.C.]

An Open Letter to Canadian Ambassador to the Philippines, Robert Collette
Via email: manil at dfait-maeci.gc.ca

Dear Ambassador Collette,

On behalf of the National Alliance of Philippine Women in Canada, we are
extremely disturbed by your recent statements in “Canadians prefer Filipino
nannies” (Philippine Daily Inquirer August 27, 2002) about Filipino nannies
reported in the Philippine media.

Your support for Canada’s Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP) and your eagerness
to extol the program’s benefits demonstrates your ignorance of numerous
academic and community-based research studies – many of which were funded by
the Canadian government – that document rampant abuses of domestic workers
under the LCP. These studies have also pinpointed the structural
inequalities of the program. Many of these studies have indicted the program
as one that should be eliminated. We will be happy to provide you with a
list of these studies and documents, which include Canadian Department of
Justice, Status of Women Canada, United Nations and other international
materials
.

·         “Barriers to Justice: Ethnocultural Minority Women and Domestic
Violence – A Preliminary Discussion Paper”, 1995, Canadian Department of
Justice – describes the power differential between the employer and the
domestic worker, how educational requirements seem arbitrary and racist, and
how different legislation on provincial and federal levels leads to many
problems especially in the field of enforcement of standards upon employers.

·         “Brown Women, Blonde Babies”, 1992, Productions Multi-Monde, a
film documentary that describes thousands of women who leave their homes and
families in the Philippines every year to work abroad as domestics where
they make their way to Canada, forming part of "the Third World [found in
Canadian] living rooms".

·         “Housing Needs Assessment of Filipina Domestic Workers”, 1996 and
“Trapped: Holding onto the Knife's Edge: Economic Violence Against Filipino
Migrants / Immigrant Women”, 1997, Philippine Women Centre of B.C. – both
studies discuss the human rights violations experienced under the LCP,
especially due to the live-in requirement which forces women to live-in the
employer’s home.

·         “Filipino Nurses Doing Domestic Work: A Stalled Development”,
2000, Philippine Women Centre of B.C. - was a research project funded by the
Status of Women Canada to explore the situation of Filipino nurses doing
domestic work and their experiences with de-skilling of their nursing
skills, the lengthy, arbitrary and barrier-filled accreditation process, and
the use of these women as cheap labour to promote the privatization of
health care agenda.

·         Concluding observations on Canada by the UN Committee on the
Elimination of Racial Discrimination, 2002 – comments expressed concern on
the treatment of migrants and their children, from the “right of landing
 fee” which may have discriminatory effects on persons coming from poorer
countries to lack of status for migrant children which excludes them from
the school system.

·         “Filipina identities: Geographies of Social Integration /
Exclusion in the Canadian Metropolis”, forthcoming, a study by the PWC in
collaboration with Deirdre McKay from the University of British Columbia –
discusses how the social construct of Filipino women as subservient, docile
and meek domestic workers which is being entrenched by government programs
like the LCP.

·         Also, The Metropolis Project: An international forum for research
and policy on migration, diversity and changing cities website is a conduit
to more international presentations on the issue of domestic work. The
Metropolis Project hosts an annual international conference on migration at
which the LCP has been examined.

By promoting the LCP to people in the Philippines, you are dangerously
playing upon the desperation of impoverished Filipinos -- while covering up
the harsh reality they will face in Canada. Beyond the documented
experiences above there are also mothers under the LCP who have
Canadian-born children who cannot complete the rigid requirements of the
LCP. They are then deported, placing this mother in the inhumane position of
deciding to bring her child to a country mired in poverty, or to abandon her
child to the social system in Canada. As for the “solid social working
environment and job protection” for domestic workers that you discussed at
length, domestic workers are not even covered under the basic employment
standards uniformly across Canada, and sometimes not at all in several
provinces! Reports of verbal and physical abuse, rape, overwork, underpay,
long hours, and illegal work with little or no protection in return make the
domestic worker one of the most vulnerable workers in Canadian society.

As our Canadian representative we expect and would appreciate a response to
these issues, which must be brought to your attention.

Sincerely,

Monica Urrutia
on behalf of the National Alliance of Philippine Women in Canada





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