Nanny wins landmark suit after Star investigation
A foreign caregiver brought to Canada with a job offer from a “ghost employer” has been awarded $10,000 in damages in what is believed to be the first court victory against a nanny recruiter.
Who haven’t heard of immigration queue jumpers? The current federal government used this term when it shut down visa-free travel from the Czech Republic and Mexico. Federal officials blamed queue jumping refugee claimants. But if someone jumps the queue, it’s not refugees as much as it is temporary guest workers. And their biggest aider and abettor is Ottawa itself. Estimated 65,000 refugee claims were pending in 2008, but almost 192,519 foreigners came to Canada as temporary workers last year. A Toronto Star investigation revealed that many of them are vulnerable, abused, and prone to go underground, especially during a recession. The Canadian government wants to be in the labour supply business, but it’s not doing a good job.
The temp worker program lets employers select employees abroad if the federal labour officials certify a worker shortage in the employer’s industry. Today, most foreign workers go to farms, oil fields and into other low-skilled jobs, and many eventually end up in the underground economy. The current government in particular has let an unprecedented number of low-skilled migrants in Canada. Ottawa essentially acts as a giant recruitment agency that sizes up clients’ labour needs and fills them with people from foreign countries on condition that they go back home after two years. Foreign workers can’t switch jobs without the government’s permission. In Ontario and Alberta seasonal agricultural workers can’t join unions. And low-skilled workers can’t easily apply for permanent residence in Canada. After all, the idea is to bring in cyclical labour.
And cyclical labour they bring. Farms needs crop gatherers. Fast food joints need burger flippers. Energy companies need oil-sand workers. There are so many people in the world willing to work for much less than Canadians. Cheap labour, like any other cheap resource, can translate into lower costs across the production chain and lead to lower prices, economic growth, and general happiness. And the conventional wisdom goes that Canadians don’t want to do those jobs anyway. Temporary workers are also not supposed to strain our health care because they don’t grow old here. We have a constant supply of fresh, young, cheap labour thanks to the federal super recruiters in Ottawa. Right?
Wrong. The Toronto Star investigation revealed a widespread abuse of temporary foreign workers. Some employers take advantage of their weak bargaining power. Some employers refuse to pay their wages. Some pay much less than promised. Some fire workers without regard to their labour rights. Foreign workers often come from poor countries after borrowing thousands of dollars for the trip and middlemen’s fees. They feed their families who stayed behind. The law doesn’t let them switch employers easily. It’s not exactly a position of power in negotiating your job conditions. The Toronto Star report shows how many workers end up underground. They are the real queue jumpers, but who dare blame these abused people? Where they jump is not permanent residence in Canada but permanent limbo. They jump to a life of fear of authorities and working underground. Debts, hungry families overseas, and false hopes stop them from leaving.
They form a massive underclass—desperate and without rights—pushing many of them into crime. We have traditionally had two classes of people who lived in Canada: citizens and permanent residents. Their rights are similar but permanent residents lack some important rights that all citizens enjoy. Today we are adding a third class and even a fourth class way down the social ladder: the temporary workers with few rights and the temporary workers gone illegal—with almost no rights. Economic cycles come and go, but marginalized migrants will stay.
The government should get out of the labour supply business. If a job is low-paid, it doesn’t mean that Canadians don’t want to do it. It means the job must be better paid. And the market will take care of it without Ottawa’s bureaucrats crunching numbers in their spreadsheets. By importing massive cheap labour the federal government discourages higher productivity and wages. Unless a job involves killing people, there is hardly a qualified Canadian who wouldn’t take it for a fair wage. And if there are no takers, the job doesn’t belong in Canada.
The immigration policy should target the real issue instead of tampering with the labour market. And the real issue is the population growth. We desperately need more people in Canada, and the only realistic source is immigration. But we need immigrants with full rights, who are proud and secure and who understand and value the Canadian society. About 900,000 of potential permanent residents and future citizens are languishing in the huge backlog. In the meantime, Ottawa tempts hundreds of thousands of the world’s vulnerable to jump the queue and end up as marginalized migrants in Canada’s cities.
By Pulat Yunusov
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underclass ‘Guest worker’ abuses blasted
Lack of oversight by the federal government has allowed foreign workers to be abused by their employers, Auditor General Sheila Fraser says in a scathing report on Canada’s immigration program.
Fraser said federal authorities do not follow up on job offers for foreign workers to see if the jobs offered are real, if the employer can afford promised wages and if there is a real need for the worker.
The recent arrival by boat in Vancouver of 76 Sri Lankan Tamil men has triggered heated debate about Canada’s refugee system. On October 28, the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia held a forum on the topic, entitled “The “Ocean Lady”: A New Challenge of Illegal Migration on Canada’s West Coast?” One of the panellists, Daniel McLeod, who is duty counsel for the migrants, called these men “classic refugees,” because of the persecution they face in Sri Lanka. “It’s young Tamil men in Sri Lanka who are most at risk,” he said. He also observed that though “the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam at their peak had probably 1500 to 2500 soldiers,” there are currently a quarter of a million Tamils awaiting security clearance by the Sri Lankan government in internment camps in the northern parts of the island.
McLeod, who is also an instructor in Refugee Law at UBC, noted that Canada is a signatory to the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees, which states that refugees cannot be penalised for entering the country through illegal means. Canada’s acceptance of the Convention was triggered by its refusal in 1939 to admit the St Louis, a boat containing 907 Jewish refugees, who were forced to return to Germany, where a third of them were killed in concentration camps. However, host and fellow-panellist, Benjamin Perrin, Assistant Professor at UBC Law and Faculty Associate at the Liu Institute, said that because the 1951 Convention only addresses the criminalisation of the entry, “it does not preclude countries from exercising detention where the identities of the individuals are uncertain or there are undetermined security risks.”
McLeod cautioned against assuming the men were Tamil Tigers. “It is common for people who have been forced to work as labourers for the Tigers, to be rounded up, arrested by the army, police, or the special task force – which is a police commando force – and simply disappear,” he said. When describing the men, nearly all of whom are currently confined in a Lower Mainland jail, McLeod said, “Some of them are students, some are farmers, some of them are clerks, office workers. They are all very scared.”
In Canada the acceptance rate for refugees is approximately 47%. In comparison, according to Andreas Schloenhardt, Associate Professor from University of Queensland, in Australia, that number is 80%. (However, Australia has a very different immigration system, which involves using whole islands far from the mainland as detention centres, so these numbers may not be analogous.) Yet the 2007 acceptance rate specifically for Sri Lankans in Canada was 97%.
In 1986, local fishermen came to the rescue of 154 Sri Lankans found floating off in lifeboats off the coast of Newfoundland. Those people were not subjected to what McLeod called “the political frenzy that’s occurring today,” suggesting that in the intervening two decades Canada’s policing of its borders has become progressively more exclusionary and reactionary. This fear was solidified on November 2, when Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, after accepting the fewest refugees in 10 years, dramatically cut the 2010 target number of refugees to be accepted by more than half. Opposition MPs assert that “by steeply dropping the targets, refusing to appoint Refugee Board members for 2 years, cutting $4 million in the department and allowing for board appointments not based on merit, Harper’s Conservative government is deliberately creating a crisis in the refugee system. The crisis is then used as an excuse to bring in draconian measures to close the door to the most needy and vulnerable.”
At the lecture, Perrin claimed that the focus on the “human interest story” of the 76 men, while legitimate, shifts attention away from an analysis of the means by which refugees move illegally between countries. He argued that “Canada must take action to discourage illegal migration and disrupt migrant smuggling operations where they do exist.” Further, Canada is a party to the 2004 UN Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air, which, he said, “calls for [migrants] not to be criminalised, but to be treated humanely. But at the same time, it does not give them the right to temporary or permanent residence in Canada simply because they are smuggled.”
When one student then questioned him about the language used to describe the men, specifically the term “illegal migrant” (which was featured in the panel title), because of the way it implicitly criminalises the men, Perrin responded that “the title of the presentation has a question mark at the end of it, which was very deliberate.” Another audience member had a query about how that kind of vocabulary negatively affects media coverage. Perrin responded, “I think it’s important that before there’s been an impartial determination of the legal status of these individuals, that our language reflect that. So I’m not calling them refugees right now because I don’t know if they are.”
Perrin maintained that “there are advantages to cooperating with other countries, not just the source countries, but also other countries along the migrant smuggling chain,” because this would assist Canada in “creating proactive responses to protracted refugee situations.” One reporter asked, “How are we to trust the Sri Lankan government if they say these people are members of a terrorist organisation? [...] How do you trust a government which is treating a minority as harshly as them?” McLeod answered, “I hope we’re not going to trust the Si Lankan government to make that determination for us. There are a number of ways that Canada Border Services Agency can obtain information in normal ways.” These include taking fingerprints to run through international police records and analysing accents to determine where in Sri Lanka the men are from. However, the RCMP has already begun collaborating with the Sri Lankan government to identify the men.
“There are 16 million refugees worldwide as of June 2009. There’s another 26 million internally displaced persons, who don’t count as refugees,” said McLeod. “Hundreds, if not thousands, of irregular migrants are reported dead or missing every year,” said Perrin.
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A previous version of this article first appeared in Canadian Lawyer. This article was last modified on Nov 5.
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vancouver Sanctuary gives way to freedom
Andrew Chung writes:
The federal government decided to grant Belaouni permanent residency status, made official on Oct. 22, despite ordering him deported in late 2005, when his application to stay on humanitarian and compassionate grounds was rejected. His application for refugee status had been turned down the year prior.
According to The Globe and Mail:
A group of Quebec immigrants has succeeded in striking down a controversial law that barred their children from entering English-language elementary schools.
In a 7-0 ruling today, the Supreme Court of Canada said Quebec must pass a less “excessive” provision within a year if it intends to replace the dead prohibition.
Within minutes, Quebec’s minister responsible for language, Christine St-Pierre, touched off what promised to be a day of political discord in the province by saying that she was “disappointed and angry” at the ruling. The ruling upheld a 2007 Quebec Court of Appeal decision that struck down the law, which prevented a child from attending a non-subsidized English-language elementary school for a year or less and then transferring into the English public school system.
Read the full decision in Nguyen v. Quebec (Education, Recreation and Sports), 2009 SCC 47
I have yet to get through the full decision (exams are creeping up), but please share your thoughts.
On Mar. 18, 2009, Hon. Jason Kenney, Min. of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, spoke at Huron College at UWO.
He spoke on a variety of subjects, but largely focused on what he perceived to be the role of his Ministry.
It was his opinion that immigrants to Canada are pretty well off – they have their own institutions and organizations, and don’t really need much governmental support. Never mind that he talked at great length to dismiss the legitimacy of organizations that have criticized his policies, and failed to identify which organizations spoke for the most discriminated elements in society.
What immigrants do need is language skills. Min. Kenney rebuffed studies that have shown that recent immigrants to Canada are faring far worse than previous generations by saying it’s because they don’t have proficiency in English or French.
The fact that Canada’s immigration patterns in recent decades have shifted to substantially more racial minorities obviously does not play into the equation. Somehow the immigrants from eastern Europe and the Ukraine, which populated significant parts of central Canada where Kenney was raised, did not have the same problems, even though they did not learn English in their first generation either.
But to make it worse, these immigrants don’t even do what they need to be doing. Only 20% of them take language classes offered by the government.
So you see, if you’re an immigrant to Canada and you’re having a tough time, it’s really your fault, not the government’s. Min. Kenney seemed oblivious to the acute xenophobia towards these immigrants, and denied that there have been calls to bar certain groups from entry to Canada. He thought the British and Australian immigration models (and responses) was something we should emulate.
Min. Kenney, are you not monitoring levels of intolerance in Canada? Or are you only concerned about helping your political constituency alone?
Kenney was unable to explain how he learned so much about immigrants and visible minorities who face discrimination while growing up in Saskatchewan. He conceded his social group consisted of all white-males as a youth, but attributed that to his involvement with the Liberal Party at the time. All of the minorities were obviously hiding out in the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada.
Updates
Min. Kenney repeated the call for immigrants to speak English or French before immigrating to Canada at a conference in Calgary, clearing up any ambiguity that may have previously existed.
These policies are nothing more than a covert for of racism, seeking to perpetuate historic racist legislation in Canada that sought to bar ethnic minorities from entering Canada, and overturn progress made in recent years to remedy these policies.
More recent statements seem to indicate he is backpedalling in face of sharp criticism by the public. Despite blaming the media, Min. Kenney’s statements are recorded by the media and attendees at his talks this week.
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