This week’s CBC News expose on a Filipino-owned nanny agency (see story on page ) is further proof that the Livein Caregiver Program (LCP) is fraught with problems. The story on North Vancouver-based A-Pro Caregivers and Nannies is not a rare occurrence. There are other more terrible stories about how our kababayans are being plied upon by their own because of their desperate need to find work abroad. In fact, Toronto’s The Philippine Courier had a story last May on two Filipina caregivers who give $3,500 to a ‘bogus’ Filipino immigration agent to help process the entry of their two friends from Israel and the Middle East to work in Canada only to find out that the so called agent did not do any processing and disappeared from Toronto.
This and many other stories from other places in Canada makes a strong argument for the scrapping of the LCP, a move long-advocated by progressive women’s’ group in Canada including the Vancouver-based Philippine Women Centre of B.C. They contend that the LCP is an anti-woman and racist policy that relegates women to domestic servitude that violates their basic human rights as a person. For those unfamiliar with the program, the LCP looks like the ‘lifeline’ for a sure entry to Canada, albeit it now takes several years for approval but still quicker than the normal immigration process as an independent applicant. The LCP is temporary worker program which provides no immigration status to the worker. Strict immigration rules practically bounds the worker to his or her employer for a live-in period of two years within a three-year window in case there are interruptions to the employment. So rigid are the rules that a mere underemployment of a day or a month will automatically result in deportation – even if the cause is due to sickness as in the case of Laila Elumbra in Montreal who was stricken by a rare blood disease just a month or so before her two-year period expired. Only through a concerted community action did the government finally relented and she was granted a reprieve. No amount of ‘tinkering’ as other groups proposed will solve the problems inherent in the policy. As long as they remain ‘temporary’, the threat of deportation will always remain as a ‘Damocles sword’ over their heads. Ambassadors of ‘goodwill’ or ‘ill’? Lauro Baja Jr., former Philippine ambassador to the United Nations has been accused by his Filipina housemaid of slavery and human trafficking. Marichu Suarez Baonan alleged in a civil suit filed against Baja in New York that she paid $5,000 to Baja and a travel agency run by Baja’s wife for a promised nursing job. Instead, she ended up working as Baja’s maid and paid only $100 for three months of work at the ambassador’s The Philippines’ Daily Tribune reports in an exclusive story that the case of Baja is just the latest in a long list of Filipino diplomats who have been accused of crimes and acts of corruption while serving in their prestigious posts abroad.
What is shocking according to The Tribune, is that many of the victims or targets allegedly by Filipino diplomats were desperate overseas workers including some who sought refuge in Philippine embassies only to be abused by our own diplomats. The government does not make any bones in extolling overseas workers as the ‘modern heroes’ for keeping afloat a moribund economy to the tune of $10 billion a year in remittances. Yet, officials abroad who are supposed to help them or give them sanctuary are themselves accused of crimes against them. Indeed, the Baja’s of the diplomatic corp indeed are not fit to be called ambassadors of goodwill.
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