Montreal, QC – On Wednesday, April 23rd at 10:00 AM, the Filipino community in Montreal and a representative from MP Thomas Mulcair’s office will hold a press conference to speak against the passing of Bill C-50, a budget bill that proposes unprecedented and dangerous changes to the immigration system.

Under Bill C-50, the Citizenship and Immigration Minister will be given the right to select applications and determine if applications should be fast-tracked, frozen, or even denied, despite already fulfilling the strict requirements. The Conservative government justifies these policy changes as an effort to reduce a backlog of 800,000 applications, and further reduce the small amount of funding allocated for immigrant application processing. The government funding set aside for immigration processing is currently 1% of the overall immigration budget. In reality, this is a move to increase the arbitrary power of the government to approve permanent residency applications.

“Bill C-50 will certainly leave the Filipino community more vulnerable to human rights violations as temporary workers,” states Roderick Carreon, National Chairperson of SIKLAB-Canada (Advance and Uphold the Rights and Welfare of Overseas Filipino Workers in Canada). “Under the racist and anti-woman policies of the Live-In Caregiver Program (LCP), Filipinos have been placed in slave-like working conditions where they already experience abuse by their employers and long hours without overtime pay. Now, the Canadian government wants to heighten their exploitation by removing the little protection they currently receive under Canadian laws.”

Filipino women, make up over 90% of those entering Canada under the Live-In Caregiver Program. After completing 24 months of service, within a 36-month period, they are eligible to apply for permanent residency and sponsor their families. Since the early 1980s, nearly 100,000 Filipino women have come to Canada  under the LCP and its predecessor program, the Foreign Domestic Movement (FDM).  With this new bill, women currently working under the LCP are vulnerable to having their permanent residency applications arbitrarily denied.  For nearly 20 years, the organizations under the National Alliance of  Philippine Women in Canada has been documenting and researching the experience of the Filipino community under this program and calling for the scrapping of the Live-In Caregiver Program and all anti-immigrant policies. This call is all the more stronger with the introduction of this new bill.

The press conference speakers will include a representative from NDP-MP Thomas Mulcair’s office, Mr. Graham Carpenter; Roderick Carreon, Chairperson of  SIKLAB-Canada, and Joanne Vasquez, Board Member of the Kapit Bisig Centre at 4900 Fulton Street, Montreal.

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—Philippine Women Centre of Quebec—
Under the supervision of the National Alliance of Philippine Women in Canada (NAPWC), we are an institution of research, education, advocacy, and capacity building by Filipino women for the Filipino community.
Tel: (514) 678-3901