Report Executive summary

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. These include the vulnerability and exploitation that come with workers’ precarious status in Canada; more recent concerns about the labyrinth of changes as a result of successive pilot programs introduced in the last ten years; and a lack of transparency and oversight around the pilots’ delivery. We also observe how despite the federal government often celebrating changes to the care worker programs, care workers have become increasingly precarious, losing sight of the promise of permanency in Canada. This is despite their significant contributions to the Canadian economy and the well-being of families as well as a long history of activism and hard-won battles with the Canadian government.

While we celebrate Canada’s newest commitment to “provide home care workers with permanent residence (PR) on arrival in Canada” (IRCC 2024), we also identify eight key recommendations that arise from our research and that continue to demand attention from IRCC and the forthcoming pilots:

• Implement the promise of permanent residency upon arrival for all migrant care workers entering the country, in a one-step application process, as promised in the June 2024 IRCC announcement.
• Develop a permanent immigration program for care workers as soon as possible.
• Assure regularization for undocumented care workers including for those who have fallen out of status, especially due to the rapidly changing nature of the 2014 and 2019 pilot programs.
• Eliminate the current backlog and “inventory” of migrant care worker permanent residency applications, prioritizing and allocating spaces in the multi-year levels plan to those already in Canada, and ensuring there are no caps or limits on the number of accepted, processed, and approved PR applications from those already in Canada.
• Create wider and more dispersed windows of time to apply beyond January 1st, or use a lottery system for selecting applications to process, so that care workers abroad have a fair chance of coming to Canada and performing much-needed care provision.
• Implement more robust worker protections for care workers, including making available and mandating employer education, alongside permanent residency upon arrival.
• Comprehensively track and transparently publish foundational labour market data including hours worked, wages, and number of actively working individuals for those who enter Canada under a migrant care worker program, past and present.
• Ratify the International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention on Domestic Workers (C-189) to ensure that the working conditions of migrant care workers in Canada meet those established by the ILO Convention on Domestic Workers.
• Develop a comprehensive plan to build the capacity of community-based organizations that assist migrant care workers to navigate Canada’s complex immigration and employment rights systems, provide education and social support, and advocate for better conditions for this group of vulnerable and often marginalized workers.