Balancing life and inconvenience

It was a balmy Sunday afternoon. A perfect time to clean the backyard although there was a hint of frost in the forecast.

My wife left the house an hour earlier to meet with our youngest daughter for their Mother’s Day dinner date, and later, to watch a documentary film, Poetry in Motion, at the Royal Theatre on College Street. Halfway to the venue, the 506 streetcar she was riding got stuck behind four other streetcars on University Avenue.

My daughter called on her cell phone, wondering whether her mom knew the restaurant’s address. She had to leave her apartment late to give more time for little Onegin, her new dog.

I reassured my daughter that her mom had left an hour before and could just be browsing inside one of the vintage shops near the Royal. That night, my wife went home late after her tryst with our youngest, fuming she had to take a cab as no streetcars were in sight. “But we saw a very good documentary,” she said, as I tried to catch the climax of a TV movie re-run.

My wife rattled on and told me she had to get off the streetcar twice because the streetcars couldn’t move; some stretches and intersections along College were clogged with Tamil demonstrators. She had to walk almost a mile to meet my daughter. When they got off the theatre, little did she know that the Tamil demonstrators had seized a ramp of the Gardiner Expressway along the lakeshore causing more traffic. It was only the next morning when she picked up the newspaper from our porch that she realized what had transpired.

The city mayor warned he would order the arrest of defiant Tamil protesters if they created another traffic chaos while the Toronto police chief was visibly irked at the organizers for bringing children and seniors to join the march. More than 2,000 demonstrators of Tamil origin commandeered a ramp of the Gardiner Expressway, one of the city’s busiest highways.

“The protesters were endangering themselves, they were endangering the public, and they were endangering the police,” the Toronto mayor said.

Meanwhile, hundreds of Tamil Tigers were reportedly killed in a bloodbath in Sri Lanka that weekend. Tamil Canadians were demonstrating on the streets of Toronto to denounce the attacks which they called genocide. Leaders of the Coalition to Stop the War in Sri Lanka said there would be more and larger protests forthcoming.

Many Torontonians woke up the following Monday morning feeling crabby over the inconvenience to commuters, motorists and pedestrians caused by the blockade of the Gardiner. The city bureaucrats and police were spinning concerns about imagined dangers to the public if the street protests should go awry.

It was a lazy Sunday afternoon. Those who drove their cars going to the city could have easily taken alternative routes through the city inner roads. Commuters on streetcars could just have stretched their legs and walked on a beautiful afternoon, as many riders like my wife did. How would this little inconvenience compare with 3,000 innocent lives wiped out by a ruthless government?

The protesters were Canadians of Tamil origin, who brought their elders and their young children along because this was a serious life-and-death family matter: relatives and other members of their families in Sri Lanka are being massacred.

Does the Canadian government have a responsibility to respond to the demands of the protesters? Of course there is, and it is a legal and moral one. Relatives and members of Canadian families are being killed in a genocidal war and all the protesters are asking is for the Canadian government to listen and put pressure on the Sri Lankan government and for other nations to declare an immediate ceasefire, or to impose economic and political sanctions if the Sri Lankan government refuses an international plea for ceasefire. Is it so difficult for the Minister of Foreign Affairs to summon the Sri Lankan ambassador to his office to explain the continuing killing of innocent citizens in his country?

Canada is known as a peace broker and for its efforts to rehabilitate and rebuild regions in the world which are devastated by armed conflict. We cannot simply watch on the sidelines and ignore the genocide in Sri Lanka. We have peace-keeping troops in Afghanistan and our soldiers are getting killed in a war against terror that primarily benefits the United States, yet it is absurd that Canada will not step in a desperate situation where relatives of its citizens are getting killed.

We are a signatory to the Protocol Additional II to the 1949 Geneva Convention and Relating to the Protection of Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts (1979), which Canada ratified on November 11, 1990, and the Canadian Charter of Rights also guarantees the freedom of peaceful assembly.

The city mayor of Toronto and the police have no legal override to restrict the right of Tamil Canadians to peaceably assemble on our streets, especially if they do not threaten the safety of the public or cause public mayhem, except for minor inconveniences such as traffic or commuter delays. As a peace-loving and humanitarian society, the killings of other innocent citizens, though they may happen thousands of miles away from our shores, also affect us very deeply, and therefore we have a moral obligation to extend our help to victims of such carnage and the duty to speak to the world to act in order to stop these killings now.

Street protests have been vital to democracy. Public rallies in East Germany helped bring down the Berlin Wall. The American civil rights marches led to stronger equality rights laws. More than a million Filipinos protesting in Manila during the height of the Philippine Power Revolution brought down the Marcos dictatorial regime.

The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution specifically allows peaceful demonstrations and the freedom of assembly to facilitate the redress of grievances against the government. Our own Charter of Rights guarantees this freedom subject only to reasonable limits that can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.

Outside of North America, especially in regions where democracy and the rule of law are still fledgling concepts, street protests are about life-and-death issues. It’s probably because the stakes of protest here are a lot lower that we easily whine if we are inconvenienced by traffic snags. It was entirely different from the 1960s when young people took to the streets in droves because they were afraid they would be shipped off to Vietnam.

Given that the armed conflicts in Sri Lanka and Afghanistan may not be our own wars, the loss of innocent lives on account of an unjust war should be sufficient enough for us to feel empathy and compassion for those who lose their loved ones. The loss of life of a fellow human being should be powerful enough to galvanize us because our lives are also affected in many ways.

This year, Parisians hit the streets to object against Facebook’s redesign. In India, nearly 1,000 snake charmers played their flutes as they marched through the streets performing with cobras and other live snakes that have been banned since 1991 Their demand: allow snake charmers their traditional way of life and let them perform again. How much rage do we need to draw people to the streets to denounce the genocide in Sri Lanka? If these freak issues could hold the attention of many to the chagrin of some bureaucrats, why wouldn’t the city of Toronto be inclusive enough to let Tamil Canadians march down city streets demanding the Canadian government to show concern for the lives of relatives being killed in Sri Lanka?

Toronto is a much more liberal and caring city than the University of Utara Malaysia whose chancellor, the Sultan of Kedah, warned intellectuals not to get involved with negative activities such as street demonstrations. The Sultan said streets are not the right avenues for protest against the establishment, suggesting that the university should adopt the Socratic approach instead. Let’s hope he wasn’t insinuating that we drink hemlock, as Socrates did, to end it all.

Days of slave labour far from over

Toronto’s nanny controversy was first exposed by the Toronto Star when it reported last March 14, 2009, that caregivers from the Philippines were being lured to come to Canada for at least $5,000 per head for jobs which turned out to be bogus. One nanny recalled joining 16 other unemployed nannies in the cramped basement of a nanny recruiter’s house where they were detained and incarcerated without proper food. All 16 of them were harassed, scared and exploited to work for the recruiter under oppressive conditions. Their passports were kept by the recruiter obviously to prevent them from running away.

On Tuesday, May 5, 2009, Liberal MP Ruby Dhalla, a fast-rising member of the Federal Parliament and potential cabinet member if the Liberal Party regains power, found herself in the eye of the storm when two caregivers alleged they were illegally employed by Ms. Dhalla and then badly mistreated. In addition to seizing their passports, the Filipino nannies claimed that they were also forced to perform work outside their contract as caregivers such as cleaning the chiropractic clinic which belonged to the MP’s brother, cleaning the house of the MP’s mother, and shovelling snow until midnight.

This report of abuses against nannies by their recruiters and employers is a clear reminder to us that the days of indentured servitude or slavery, in short, are not yet over. That nannies from the Third World such as the Philippines are comparable to victims of human trafficking, a euphemism for slave trade, which Hillary Clinton called the “dark underbelly of globalization.”

In his book, A Crime so Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern Day Slaves, Benjamin Skinner wrote: “There are more slaves today than at any point in human history.” Skinner estimated that there are currently 27 million worldwide, 143 years after the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed in 1865, and 60 years after the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights banned slavery worldwide.

After four years of researching for his book while posing as a buyer at illegal brothels on several continents, Skinner concluded that slavery in its many forms – debt bondage, forced domestic servitude and forced prostitution – still exists and is shocking, mostly because it is invisible to those of us who don’t know where to look for it.

What the Filipino nannies went through in Toronto is just part of the current North-South system of exploitation. The South’s (the Third World) role is essentially to supply cheap labour that perpetuates servitude, defying the official rhetoric that although decent work is an important element in achieving reduction in poverty, everything remains the same.

And sometimes, there is a danger in the myopic vision of some advocates of caregiver reforms that punishing illegal recruiters or forcing a politician to step down after being exposed as an abusive employer is enough, or it is at the very least an important part of the public relations offensive to shame a government that is insensitive to the working conditions of caregivers.

Let’s consider the recent efforts of some advocates of caregiver reforms in the Filipino community in Toronto.

After the Toronto Star exposé of the bogus operations of nanny recruiters, caregiver advocates demanded that recruitment agencies be licensed and regulated by the provincial government. A new bill in the Ontario provincial parliament is on its way to becoming a law that will require registration of nanny employment or recruitment agencies and prohibit them from charging fees from prospective nannies. Lawyers and immigration consultants who are in the immigration business are not subject to this new law because they are governed under a different regulatory framework. So nanny recruitment agencies can simply pass on their invoices for fees to their lawyers or immigration consultants, who in turn will pay the agencies for their share of the cost of doing work for documenting nanny applications.

Forcing MP Ruby Dhalla to resign is not going to help Filipino nannies in achieving the reforms they want. “Gotcha” doesn’t work in Canada, especially against a member of Parliament. Ms. Dhalla has already resigned from her post as party critic for youth and multiculturalism affairs and has asked the federal ethics commissioner to review the allegations of abuse and illegal behaviour against her, steps that are aimed at cooling down the controversy. Besides, “we don’t hang people on the floor of the House of Commons,” as Bob Rae, another Liberal MP said.

The obvious call to arms by one Filipino community organization to fan the flames of public outcry against MP Ruby Dhalla is an example of a small-minded perspective of the issues that really confront Filipino caregivers. If Filipinos are really hell-bent in ousting Ms. Dhalla from the federal Parliament, they can do so by campaigning against her during the elections in her riding in Brampton.

At least three advocacy groups are on target concerning the most important of the caregiver issues. These are the Community Alliance for Social Justice (CASJ), the Caregivers Support Services, and the recently-formed Grassroots Hub (G-Hub), a network of independent community and migrant workers, organizations and individuals informally linked though the initiative of the Filipino Catholic Missions of the Archdiocese of Toronto.

All three advocacy organizations are demanding that the federal government grant permanent residence status to caregivers upon their arrival in Canada. The core of their argument is that nannies become vulnerable to abuse by recruitment agencies and employers because of their temporary status. Nannies have no other choice but to go along with the wishes of their agencies or employers and bear their suffering in silence because their temporary residence is a clear path for them to gain permanent resident status after completing two years of caregiver work during their first three years in Canada.

But this rationale stands on infirm legs. Caregivers are determined on a set of criteria lower than those required of permanent resident applicants. If they are to be processed against the criteria for permanent residents, they obviously will not qualify. To land them permanently upon arrival will be discriminatory to permanent resident applicants.

A possible compromise is to give caregivers permanent residence status under the following conditions: (1) they must stay with their employers and will be allowed to change employers only on reasonable cause; (2) they will have the option to live-in with their employers or stay live-out, and employers’ approval is not necessary; (3) they will not be able to sponsor their family members (spouses and children) unless they have completed two years of their work contract; (4) all incoming caregivers will be required to register with a provincial office who will be responsible in monitoring their contract and working conditions; and (5) they will be allowed to continue their studies to upgrade their skills during their free time.

But under the present Conservative government, the likelihood is that the Live-in Caregiver Program might be scrapped and applicants for caregivers will be lumped together with temporary and seasonal workers. Between this possible scenario and the present program, caregivers are better off where they are now. It is also conceivable that the Conservative or even a Liberal government may increase child-care subsidies to parents to do away with hiring of live-in caregivers for their pre-school children.

Poverty is the very reason why many Filipino women are forced or even hoodwinked into accepting caregiver jobs, or into becoming modern-day slaves. It is the primary driver of slavery today, and unscrupulous agencies have taken advantage of this situation. As long as there’s a ready source of people who are so desperate for survival, and if we don’t address that, there will always be slavery.

Filipino nannies in Toronto are not alone in their suffering and struggle. In Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy, John Bowe provides a guide to the contemporary American scourge of labour abuse and outright slavery. Bowe visited locations in Florida, Oklahoma, and the U.S.-owned Pacific island of Saipan, where slavery cases have been brought to light as recently as 2006.

Instead of chains, Bowe found that modern slavery uses coercion in the form of threats of deportation, beatings, harm to families back home or even death. Bowe focuses on three cases: a labour contractor named El Diablo who held Mexican illegals in involuntary servitude, working in Florida orange groves, barely paid, kept in decrepit conditions and intimidated, violently, to keep quiet about it; a Tulsa, Oklahoma-man, owner of a steel-cutting plant, who contracted with an Indian-born American to recruit Indian labourers, who were overworked, underpaid, housed in squalor, and threatened with deportation if they resisted; and the U.S. commonwealth of Saipan, which recruits foreign workers, who are abused and exploited while working in sweatshops for U.S. clothing manufacturers.

About a month ago, the Philippine Daily Inquirer published a report on how Filipino women who seek employment overseas keep on getting victimized by illegal recruiters. They ended up working in a far-away land, cut off from their family, and worse, were physically abused, sometimes molested, and not even paid a cent of their wages.

It told of the story of Alice who was offered a job by an illegal recruiter who promised her a good employer, a higher salary and quick deployment to Dubai, of which she has heard good things about. When she arrived in Dubai, her first employer attempted to sexually molest her. After complaining to her agency, she was transferred to another household. Her new employer included a lecherous grandfather who kept trying to open her bedroom door at two o’clock in the morning. She learned to sleep with a knife tucked under her pillow and her bed against the door. Fearing for her life, she called the Philippine embassy for help, but before the embassy could respond, Alice was asked to pack up and leave.

Little did Alice know that the next turn of events would even be worse. Her employment agency sold her contract and passport to another agency in Oman where she found out that she had to work as a prostitute. Not willing to become a prostitute, her foreign agent sold her to another agent in Damascus, Syria. Without a visa, Alice was held in Damascus and thrown to a detention cell where her one-night stay would linger forever for the rest of her life. Eventually, she was released and found work as a domestic helper for a couple with six children. She worked from morning till late in the night doing many tasks: from cutting tree branches to cleaning the entire house and feeding the children.

Eventually, the Philippine embassy in Lebanon negotiated for the repatriation of Alice and 16 other Filipino women working under oppressive conditions in Syria.

The above accounts are not meant to downplay the experiences of our nannies in Toronto but to illustrate what slavery has become today. Modern slaves are no longer boarded on ships that cross the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. But they are still regarded as commodities that can be sold by their foreign agents, and governments and other institutions that support slavery work behind a veil of denial and subterfuge. Like the nannies in Toronto who are forced to work as caregivers hoping it is a path planted with roses towards Canadian citizenship.

Anywhere there is poverty and desperation, there will be agents who’ll negotiate, lure and entrap their victims into slavery. The world market still runs on the profit principle and the trade in human lives and labour—as it has for centuries before—remains lucrative and viable.