Caregiver Immigration: When Bad Advice Costs You Everything
Why listening to your immigration lawyer matters more than family, forums, and coworkers
Who should you listen to – your employer, your sister, your immigration lawyer, your coworkers, the wise voices on internet forums? Your sister would never wish you harm, and she has no ulterior motive – surely worth listening to. The employer is a key figure in the immigration process, and it pays to stay on good terms. And what about forums? So many knowledgeable people there, one can hardly ignore the collective wisdom. Meanwhile, the immigration lawyer has been paid good money; ignoring their advice would be foolish.
What do you do when everyone is telling you something different?
The correct answer: listen to the immigration lawyer.
The Caregiver Program
Canada has an immigration program for people who provide care for the elderly, children, and those requiring medical attention. To put it simply, it is a program for caregivers. Caregiving is not a prestigious occupation – the pay reflects that, career prospects are minimal, and few Canadians are exactly clamouring for these positions. To fill the staffing gap (because someone has to provide care, after all), Canada devised an incentive for foreign caregivers: the opportunity to apply for permanent residence after working for a specified period. And it must be said – PR in Canada is an excellent incentive.
Historically, the vast majority of caregivers are from the Philippines. The Philippines has countless courses and colleges that train people in the fine art of professional caregiving, complete with diplomas, certificates, and all the proper credentials. Filipino caregivers generally perform their duties diligently and without complaint, and the modest salary is perfectly acceptable so long as permanent residency remains on the horizon.
On the other side, employers – for the most part ordinary Canadian families – often try to pile on as much work as possible, adding housekeeping, dog-walking, grocery shopping, and everything else they can think of on top of the standard caregiving duties. Especially after recent minimum wage increases, every employer wants maximum value from every dollar paid. Whether this is ethical or legal is a separate conversation – caregivers are classified as vulnerable workers under Canadian law, and their rights are protected by legislation and regulations.
Bringing Marieta to Canada
Marieta was one such Filipino caregiver. She trained in Manila, worked in Hong Kong (Filipino caregivers are largely an export commodity, and Hong Kong is close, has plenty of employers, and is relatively easy to reach), and then, as so often happens, turned her sights on Canada. This was where caregivers could earn permanent residence, and besides, Marieta's sister was already living in Toronto, having arrived the same way a few years earlier.
Marieta's employer was a resourceful Canadian woman who ran a small daycare in a small town about three hours from Toronto. In addition to the children at the daycare, she had three of her own and lived within walking distance. She already had several Filipino workers under her – housekeepers and nannies for both the daycare and her home. Finding qualified staff willing to work for a modest salary was no easy feat, so she agreed to go through all the necessary hurdles to bring Marieta from the Philippines.
This meant the employer first had to obtain an LMIA – a Labour Market Impact Assessment – a permit from Canadian authorities confirming that hiring a foreign worker would not negatively affect the Canadian labour market: that no Canadian would be displaced, that no warm seat would be taken from a local worker, and so forth. The LMIA application alone runs to nearly 30 pages, accompanied by a substantial pile of supporting documents.
The employer watched every penny – as any prudent businessperson should. The LMIA application required proof that the foreign worker would be paid the same wage a Canadian would receive, a figure drawn from published wage statistics for the specific locality. Steeling herself, the employer entered a rate of $18.25 CAD per hour – the going median for caregivers in her town, though the objectivity of this figure was debatable.
The LMIA was approved (these applications are almost always approved when done correctly, though complications do arise). For Marieta, whose name appeared on the LMIA, this meant she could now apply for a Canadian work permit – and from there, permanent residency was within reach.
Before long, Marieta was in Canada with a valid work permit tied to her employer.
Workplace Tensions
The interesting part began almost immediately. Within a couple of weeks, Marieta was calling her immigration lawyer in bewilderment. She could not understand why she was being asked to do things she felt were outside her job description. Specifically, in addition to working at the daycare, the employer occasionally asked her to watch the children at home, and sometimes the workload kept her past her scheduled hours.
The lawyer's advice was straightforward: immigration matters and labour disputes are separate issues. In other words, this was not the lawyer's domain – but based on what Marieta described, the problem was not worth getting worked up about. She was not being harnessed to a cart, not made to haul bags of cement, not sent into the forest in winter to pick snowdrops. The simple solution was to talk to the employer and sort out what was, by all accounts, a trivial misunderstanding – especially since the employer was a perfectly reasonable woman with whom we had a good working relationship.
Marieta, however, did not take the advice seriously. Her calls continued with impressive regularity. She complained that the employer was taking advantage of her, the work was hard, free time was scarce, and the pay could be better.
Meanwhile, the pay did get better. The published wage statistics were updated, and the employer – obliged to match the going rate for foreign workers – raised Marieta's hourly rate. This was a noticeable hit to the daycare's payroll, but the employer absorbed it. Perversely, the raise only made things worse: for the higher wage, even more was expected of Marieta.
At some point, Marieta let slip the source of her expertise in labour law and worker rights: her sister in Toronto, with whom she spoke regularly and who dispensed worldly wisdom from the secure vantage point of someone who already had PR. "In Canada, they can't do that." "In Canada, everything has to be by the book." "You can file a complaint against the employer." These were just some of the valuable insights Marieta was receiving.
The employer was patient. She understood perfectly well that workers were a valuable resource, not to be discarded lightly. She tolerated inattention, forgave forgetfulness, overlooked mistakes. All her workers, recall, were Filipino. They communicated with each other exclusively in Tagalog – and unsurprisingly, the employer was not thrilled about conversations in a language she could not understand happening under her roof. Who knows what they might be plotting?
The Breaking Point
The workplace atmosphere grew steadily more tense. The Filipino workers continued chatting in Tagalog, Marieta joined their ranks and became even more enthusiastic about educating herself on the rights of the working class and the obligations of the bourgeoisie.
The climax arrived the day the employer's patience finally ran out and she dismissed one of her other workers. This particular employee had a history of negligence – on one occasion, she left a door open and a small child wandered outside. After yet another egregious breach of discipline, combined with attempts to assert her "rights," she was let go without further discussion.
What did this have to do with Marieta? She felt solidarity with her fallen comrade. She picked the dismissed worker up outside the daycare and drove her to relatives somewhere. But the next morning, when the employer asked who had seen the fired employee and where she had gone – this was, after all, a small town three hours from Toronto with nowhere to disappear to – every remaining Filipino worker, Marieta included, answered: "It wasn't me."
Miracles do not happen. The truth was easily established via security camera footage. And for her "it wasn't me," Marieta followed her colleague into exile. Not for helping a person get to where she needed to go, but for lying to her employer's face.
The bottom line: the employer – a normal, reasonable woman, it bears repeating – had taken on the risks, effort, and expense of bringing Marieta from the Philippines to Canada, giving her a job and a clear path to permanent residency within a couple of years. She had raised Marieta's wages the moment regulations required it. Marieta, meanwhile, emboldened by her sister and her coworkers, had been complaining about intolerable working conditions – not to the employer, but to the immigration lawyer, whose services were paid for by the employer and who was therefore obliged to act in the employer's interests.
Throughout, one simple message was hammered home to Marieta: "If something is bothering you, talk to the employer. You can work it out." From the employer's perspective, the logic was equally clear: here is a worker earning a decent wage; load on as many duties as possible to get value from every dollar. The worker does not complain, and as the saying goes, the horse that pulls gets the heaviest load – so keep adding until she asks for mercy. But as we have seen, the tension found a very different outlet.
Marieta's job vanished overnight, and her path to PR faces the same fate unless she manages to find a new employer very quickly (which is possible – there is demand) and resigns herself to another two years in the same position. One can only hope the experience taught her something. There is a world of difference between being a permanent resident or citizen of Canada – where losing a job means finding another one, no great tragedy – and being on a work permit where your entire immigration future is at stake. In the best case, Marieta faces a new LMIA application and a new work permit, and not every employer will be willing to take that on.
The lessons: think with your head, remember whose hands your immigration is in, do not dump all your problems on the lawyer, and do not insist on your rights as a guest while you are still working to make Canada your home. Lawpoint Immigration has extensive experience with caregiver work permits, LMIA applications, and employer-employee immigration dynamics. If you are navigating a caregiver pathway and need guidance, we can help.