People don't know about our struggle'

Foreign caregivers in Canada grapple with convoluted residency pathways, tough language tests

- NICHOLAS KEUNG

Connie Alinton arrived in Alberta in 2013 from the Philippines as a low-skilled temporary foreign worker before she moved to Ontario as a nanny in 2016. She has been caught up in the multiple changes made to the caregiver immigration program.

Connie Alinton worked in a seafood factory in the Philippines, canning sardines.

But she needed to pay for the care of her mother’s heart-enlargement problem and to support her siblings, so when an opportunity came to work in Canada in 2013, she jumped on it.

A decade after coming to this country, the Toronto home support worker and nanny, who also has a college degree in mathematics, has been trapped in a seemingly neverending bureaucratic nightmare to become a permanent resident.

It’s an unintended consequence of the successive reforms meant to improve a caregiver program in this country that was once rife with abuse and exploitation.

“Life is hard back home,” says the 48-year-old Alinton. “My elderly mom depends on me. My younger sister and her three children depend on me. My brother’s autistic son depends on me.”

In freeing foreign caregivers from the previous live-in work requirements in 2014, then prime minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government imposed new language and post-secondary education criteria, as well as an annual cap on the number of permanent resident applications under the program.

Care workers were assessed for permanent residence criteria before they began working in Canada. Once they got their work permit and accumulated two years of care experience, they could apply for permanent status.