Shame on Canadian government for playing with lives of thousands of migrant caregivers
March 8, 2026
Philippine Women Centre of Ontario Statement for International Women’s Day (2026)
Toronto, ON.—This International Women’s Day, we denouce Canada’s decades-long domestic worker recruitment schemes that exploit working-class women from the Global South and continue to leave many trapped in immigration limbo. Historically, we know these programs under various names like: the West Indian Domestic Scheme, Foreign Domestic Movement, Live-in Caregiver Program, Home Support Worker Pilot and Home Child Care Provider Pilot. On December 19, 2025, the Canadian government announced that it would “pause” the most recent iterations (the Home Care Worker Immigration Pilots) on March 31st of this year. This leaves more than 30,000 permanent residency applicants from the pilot programs in limbo and trapped in temporary status, often forcing many of the workers, largely women, into deeper economic and social precarity. The decision coincides with the anti-immigrant “Canada Strong” and “Immigration Levels Plan” policies to reduce immigration, further fuelling the rising anti-immigrant sentiments in Canada. But this scapegoating serves as a distraction from the root cause of the issue — the Canadian state’s chronic underfunding of public and social infrastructures. Instead of offering long-term solutions to Canada’s housing and food insecurity crises, the government imposed new restrictions and administrative bottlenecks on these labour programs that rely on the racialized and gendered exploitation of care workers. These policies continue to deny transnational women their worker’s rights, even as their labour sustains childcare, healthcare, and essential care systems across the country.The Philippine Women Centre of Ontario (PWC-ON) rejects this decades-long treatment of our communities as disposable workers. We demand an end to temporary labour schemes that are meant to keep workers vulnerable and continue the call for affordable, universal child care in Canada, permanent status upon arrival for all transnational workers, and secure and meaningful livelihoods for all.
Changes to Canada’s Domestic Work Recruitment
While Canada’s domestic worker schemes have historically recruited and cheapened women’s labour to fill the childcare and healthcare gaps in Canada, it has evolved with the broader temporary labour scheme—the Temporary Foreign Worker’s Program—to implement more stringent processing obstacles, while also increasingly placing financial burden and administrative costs to the workers themselves. The formalization of a domestic work program in Canada first began in the 1950s with the West Indian Domestic Scheme (WIDS). Exploiting the lack of opportunities for women in the West Indies, this program recruited women from the West Indies to be domestic servants with the promise of landed status so long as they endured working conditions that most Canadian citizens would never agree to. Later on, the Foreign Domestic Movement (1981-1992), and replaced by the Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP) (1992-2014) were created to continue importing racialized women, primarily from the Caribbean and the Philippines to fill the childcare and elderly care shortage. Through research and community investigation, the Philippine Women Centre of B.C. and Ontario have published many studies on the trafficking, sexual abuse, and multiple worker’s abuses under the LCP— from withheld pay, unpaid overtime, to delayed processing of papers, among many other issues. The LCP’s pathway to permanent residency has been used to downplay the exploitation and violence that women have experienced under this program—though this pathway has become convoluted and regulated with every rebranding of this scheme. Whether it was the West Indian Domestic Scheme, Foreign Domestic Movement (FDM) of the 1980s, or the LCP, women have continually fought for better working conditions and opportunities that have included removing employer-specific requirements, addressing unregulated work hours, and more accessible pathway to permanent residency. As a response to decades of advocacy work, the LCP was reformed by Stephen Harper’s Conservative government. In 2014, the Caring for Children and High Medical Needs pilot programs were introduced to continue gatekeeping permanent residency and perpetuated the confusion and delayed application processes for the majority of workers under the program. After a few years, the Home Childcare Provider and Home Support Worker pilots opened in 2019 with the goal to temporarily allow bringing caregivers’ families as a unit. In 2025, the Home Care Worker Immigration pilot opened in an attempt to “better handle applications and administratve processes”. This latest program discontinued a year after it was introduced without any consultation to the community. By design, the temporary nature of these pilot programs have allowed the government to skirt away the accountability and consultation process with stakeholders that policies normally go through. And even after all these rebrands, it is still the workers and the women that bare these processing costs for a settlement opportunity that remains unattainable, and often leave them trapped in further precarity.
Neoliberalism and transnational labour
As Canada positions itself as one of the major players in the global economy, it must intensify policies that keep wages as low as possible while raising the productivity of workers as high as possible to maximize profitability. As we speak, Canada would rather spend money on the military than the long standing crisis of healthcare. The TFWP, LCP and subsequent pilot labour programs are textbook examples of neoliberal policies that facilitate privatization and underfunding of healthcare and other public services that undermines worker protections by preferring to recruit cheap labour from transnational workers while also having no responsibility for their wellbeing and health. Canada has framed its domestic work recruitment programs as “immigration programs”, but we know that it functions as a neoliberal labour program that offloads its responsibility of childcare and elderly care to families and individual households, instead of implementing a universal childcare program that is publicly accessible and investing in healthcare to increase, for example, the capacity to care for this country’s aging population. As well, the government reaps benefits from workers under these program because of increasingly expensive immigration processing fees for work permits, related tests, and assessments. While income tax is deducted from the wages of the workers, majority are not eligible to receive benefits. The government profits again from their labour and ineligibility to use these services basic services like healthcare that they pay into.
Moving Forward
As long as these temporary domestic work programs continue to exist as they are, women cannot achieve economic and social equality while these programs perpetuate low-wages, precarious working conditions, casual and temporary status and normalization of abuse—both physical and systemic—as well as uphold racist labour and immigration policies. When the government says they will “pause” the caregiver pilot program, if they were genuine in taking responsibility, they would explicity outline and timeline a clear plan and steps for all the workers already in the program to obtain their permanent residence. Instead they have left thousands in limbo and disbelief. We at the PWC-ON know all too well that as long as healthcare, housing, and food security remain underprioritized, the Canadian government will continue to exploit transnational labour while failing to fully recognize or secure the workers who sustain these fundemental systems. As transnational working class women, our call for genuine permanent immigration, universal childcare, economic and social development of transnational caregivers means dismantling these very same labour programs that continue to bind us to the perpetual whims of the Canadian state’s policies. For all the women who fought for their rights and dignity under these domestic care programs, we continue to be fuelled by your collective strength and continue to move forward until these demands for a secure and meaningful livelihood become permanent.
##
For more info, contact:
Philippine Women Centre of Ontario
pwcontario@yahoo.ca
Instagram: @pwc_ontario