Federal migrant home care worker announcement a welcomed step, but some are sceptical

Migrant worker advocates say the federal government’s new plan to give migrant home care workers permanent resident status on arrival to Canada is a step in the right direction, but doesn’t go far enough to provide safe and equitable working conditions for thousands of other temporary foreign workers in Newfoundland and Labrador.

On June 3, Immigration, Refugee, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) Minister Marc Miller announced two new pilot programs for migrants who care for people in their homes, saying the programs “reflect their invaluable contributions” to the country. 

“Caregivers play a critical role in supporting Canadian families,” he said, adding the new programs “will not only improve support for caregivers, but also provide families with the quality care they deserve.”

It’s a decision some are hailing as a positive move toward providing relief for some migrant workers who face precarious living and working conditions due to the nature and uncertainty around Canada’s temporary foreign worker programs.

Adi Khaitan, an organiser with the Migrant Action Centre, a Newfoundland and Labrador-based group advocating for migrant rights in the province, says workers and activists have been fighting more than a decade for migrant workers to receive permanent residency. But, Khaitan adds, the announcement leaves out most migrant workers in the province who are working and living under precarious conditions. 

Temporary Foreign Worker programs are ‘dehumanizing’

Khaitan says Canada often associates a migrant worker’s worth with how viable they are to the economy.

“We need to move away from the constant rhetoric of equating a migrant person’s worth as a human to that of [their] economic contribution because that is inherently dehumanizing,” they said.

“Our health care is conditional, our access to housing is conditional, our ability to [access] income support is completely denied. So [our] right to survival is conditional.”

Most migrant workers have a closed work permit, meaning they cannot work for any employee other than the one who initially brought them to Canada. This can make it hard for workers to leave, even if their work conditions are unfavourable or exploitative.

These workers are often reliant on their employers for housing and other basic needs. The government also provides them with fewer safety nets, says Khaitan. Workers whose permits expire in less than a year cannot get provincial health coverage. Migrant workers are also not eligible for income support benefits.

By becoming permanent residents under the new program, care workers will have access to health care and income support. but workers under other categories, including low-wage and agricultural, remain vulnerable.

“Permanent residence is very important in addressing a lot of these issues. But what we need is expansion around this; we need permanent resident status for all,” Khaitan said.

Canada introduced the Temporary Foreign Worker Program in the 1970s as a last resort for employers who could not hire skilled workers at home. Through the program, employers would hire international workers, and in return the employed migrant workers would have an easier time applying for permanent residence in Canada.

Temporary workers are hired under many categories, including seasonal workers, care workers, or low-wage workers in retail, food, fishery and other industries.

The workers play an important role in the country’s economy; they fill positions that are facing worker shortages domestically, in large part due to poor employment standards including low wages and lack of unionization and benefits. 

Recent announcement ‘huge win’

The new residency pathway replaces the Home Childcare Provider Pilot and the Home Support Worker Pilot, which ended in June. Both federal programs started in 2019 and were intended to provide eligible temporary care workers with permanent residence.

Alicia Massie, a PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University, researched the effectiveness of the two programs during their five-year run.

As part of a research team for the Migrant Care Workers Precarity Project, Massie says she was shocked by the number of rejected applications for the two programs.

“I thought there must have had to be a mistake because I just couldn’t believe what I was looking at,” she said.

Her research found that of the 8,165 applications IRCC received in 2020 through the Home Child Care program only 1,835 were processed. 607 of those were approved, 496 were withdrawn, 732 were refused, and 6,330 were in inventory, waiting for a final decision.

In 2019, when the programs were announced, they were described as “a clear transition from temporary to permanent status,” but Massie says her research shows that has not been the case for most workers.

The constantly changing programs can cause confusion for workers who spend time fulfilling requirements for one program, only for the program to change with new requirements. Since 2014, the government has announced at least four different programs.

“You have to ensure that your private language tests are not only up to date but that they’re at the right level [and] that they’re taken with the right agency,” Massie said.

She calls the recent announcement a “huge win,” adding it’s “the number one thing that we know will improve the precarity of these folks.”

But she’s cautiously optimistic because she says the federal government makes grand claims about every migrant care residence program it announces.

Feds and province need to do more

“Our research leads me to believe that there’s just no way that a new program is going to be able to achieve the goals in the announcement unless something is done,” she said.  

Her project makes several recommendations, including the federal and provincial governments working to improve enforcement of employment standards and protections for migrant care workers.

According to Massie’s findings, the government has not processed over 30,000 applications from the previous programs. When those programs were announced in 2019, IRCC had proposed an annual 5,500-application cap, but by April 2024—five years later—it had approved just 5,700 in total, just over one-fifth of the five-year limit.

“Whether it’s more staffing, whether it’s retraining the staff, whether it’s developing better processes for people to apply — something has to change so that they could actually meet that goal.”

In an email to The Independent an IRCC spokesperson said further information on the migrant care program will be available in the coming months.

“The period between the ending of the current pilots and the launch of the new pilots will give us time to reduce the inventory of existing applications and plan for the opening of application intake under the new pilots,” the spokesperson said.

Massie says the federal government must also grant undocumented workers permanent resident status — those who came to Canada legally but lost their status due to issues with work permits or permanent residence applications, among other things. She says those workers tend to be even more vulnerable to exploitative employers and poor working conditions.