SOME OF OUR RECENT WORK

For more than a century, Canada has seen thousands of migrant care workers enter the country to provide much needed care work. Since the 1950s, migrant women of colour making a living through care work have often been denied or barriered from accessing clear pathways to permanent residency and navigating exploitative work conditions. In June 2024, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) announced impending new pilots for migrant care workers. While the announcement brings hope that “new pilot programs will provide home care workers with permanent residence (PR) on arrival in Canada,” we identify persistent problems with Canada’s migrant care worker programs and demonstrate why permanency upon arrival is a requisite for necessary program changes. Given the ongoing and structural issues of Canada’s migrant care worker programs, the newest pilots will also need other critical improvements to ensure dignified work and meaningful inclusion for much-needed care workers in Canada.

Our team engaged in mixed-methods research in 2023-2024 to evaluate Canada’s latest iterations of care worker pilots. Our primary focus was the 2014 Caregiver Pilots under the Temporary Foreign Worker Program and the 2019 Home Child Care Provider and Home Support Worker Pilots under the International Mobility Program. Employing methods borrowed from critical discourse analysis, criminology, and investigative journalism (Walby and Luscombe 2020), we examined records obtained from IRCC and interviews with migrant care workers. Our findings reflect ongoing critiques of the care worker programs identified by our research participants, community partners, and even internal IRCC documents.