Nanny Abuse

Filipina women have paid a heavy price in the process, and Denis Coderre, the former minister of citizenship and immigration, set the tone for the review of the Caregiver Program in the wake of the controversial auctioning of the nannies in Montreal, saying “using the Internet for slavery is revolting.” As part of the reassessment, Citizenship and Immigration is conducting a series of consultations with employment-agency officials and domestic-worker associations, and will send their recommendations to the minister of immigration later this year. “We know women in the program report being abused,” admits Immigration spokesperson Maria Iadinardi. “It’s upsetting to hear that employers threaten these women with deportation if they don’t do what they’re told.”

Equally disturbing is what happens to many domestic workers when they finish the Caregiver Program and achieve permanent residence status. Many, without access to education and retraining, continue to work as low-paid nannies, and the cycle of abuse continues. Even more troubling: a recent study by the Philippine Women’s Centre of British Columbia suggests that a growing number of nannies are working part-time as prostitutes so they can pay off bank loans and debts to unscrupulous immigration consultants. “Canada has designed a program to have a continuous supply of cheap labour,” says filmmaker Florchita Bautista, whose 1999 documentary When Strangers Reunite follows the lives of three Filipina domestic workers who came to Canada. “The poverty these women so desperately tried to pull themselves and their children out of is only being transferred from one country to another.”

A crowing rooster announces the rising of the sun over the tiny farm that Kristina’s parents own in the countryside outside of Cebu, a financial centre and popular tourist destination in the southern Philippines. As she does almost every day, Kristina’s younger sister, Jan, rose early to feed the cows and goats before sitting down to a breakfast of rice and fish. This day would be different. After kneeling in prayer with her mother, Jan left on an hour-long walk along a dirt road to catch the bus that will take her into Cebu to register for university. Four hours later, as the bus finally approached the city, she watched the densely green landscape slowly turn urban, with posh new hotels and tourist cottages lining the white sand beaches.

In the evening, wealthy foreigners jam the city’s discotheques, restaurants, and shops selling diving gear and beach wear. Jan hurries by these places. On her family’s $500 annual income she can’t afford to shop there anyway. But there are other businesses she visits that tourists never enter. Simple signs made from cardboard and paint and others of flashy neon, hang above these makeshift shops, enticing young people with information about immigration, passports, and overseas employment. Jan knows these businesses only too well. When she finishes university she will be pressured by her family to find a job abroad.

“My parents have been telling Jan that she will be responsible to pay for our brothers to go to university,” says Kristina. “And my parents told me when I was in elementary school that I would be responsible for Jan’s education.” At first Kristina resisted, and when she finished high school she took a college secretarial course. But for more than two years the only employment she could find was with a trucking company that paid only $100 a month—not nearly enough to help with the family’s expenses, let alone pay for Jan’s education.

So, finally, she found herself in an employment agency in Cebu. For a fee of $3,600, they would place Kristina in a good home in Hong Kong. But at the last minute, an aunt—who had become a mail-order bride and married a Canadian—called from BC to say that she could help find Kristina a position in Canada. There was only one problem. To get the job, she would have to borrow $500 from friends to pay for a six-month vocational training course in Cebu. She would learn how to use a microwave, vacuum, change a baby’s diaper, and do laundry. “My aunt said I would earn really good money in Canada, so I worked hard to be accepted into the Live-in Caregiver Program,” said Kristina. “My aunt also said that Canada was heaven.”

Kristina knew if she didn’t go to Canada, she wouldn’t be able to make enough money to support her family. “My friends and I would roll our eyes when we walked by a house with a new roof and a TV satellite dish,” recalls Kristina. “We knew the parents had children working abroad. How else could anyone afford fancy things like microwave ovens and dishwashers?”

Kristina doesn’t want Jan to make the same mistake she did and is warning her not to come. With good reason. Her first assignment in Canada involved caring for a two-year-old girl in Victoria and looked promising. But within a month, Kristina was nearly raped when the child’s grandfather, dressed only in his underwear and stinking of rum and marijuana, barged into the family’s recreation room where she slept. He retreated after she threatened to break a window with a lamp, but came back later that night and tried to re-enter the room.

Her frantic screams finally alerted the man’s wife, who told him to sober up and go to bed. It took her eight months to find a new employer, and every day until she left he would whisper menacingly into her ear about having sex with her. “I felt completely vulnerable,” she says. “I didn’t know what my rights were in Canada and I thought if I called the police they would blame me. It was hell.”

If these poorly paid nannies in the Live-in Caregiver Program are modern-day slaves as critics charge, their masters were the baby boomers, and their children, the so-called Generation X. A study for Status of Women Canada done in 2000 concluded that the typical profile of those employing the nannies was a married couple, age thirty-five, working in the private sector, with two kids and household earnings of more than $100,000.