Nurses trapped under LCP, politicians hit for lip service

Nurses trapped under LCP, politicians hit for lip service

VANCOUVER–On campaign week 3 in the countdown towards federal elections in January 2006, an advocacy group for foreign-trained nurses in Canada urges political leaders to pay more than lip service to issues of urgent concern affecting the nation’s health care system in crisis.

In a live interview on national radio, Federal Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh and election candidates from major political parties discussed ideas to address central problems of long hospital wait times and the privatization of much-needed health care services that have negatively affected patients and health personnel across Canada. No concrete or promising solutions however were brought forward to respond to the series of roadblocks foreign-trained nurses encounter in their attempts to practice their profession here.

“Instead of discussing practical and tangible goals to end the de-skilling of foreign-trained nurses, especially those from the Philippines recruited under Canada’s Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP) as low-wage domestic workers and 24-hour home support workers, election candidates refuse to take ownership of the problem,” criticized Sheila Farrales of the Filipino Nurses Support Group (FNSG) in Vancouver, B.C. “We are tired of politicians passing the buck from one level of government to the other,” she continued.

Farrales refers to the Health Minister’s narrow perception that instead of being a health issue to be addressed on a nationwide scale, the challenges of Filipino and other foreign-trained nurses needs only to be taken up by each province since professional licensure is a provincial jurisdiction.

“By washing their hands of the critical problems, political leaders would rather not deal with the difficulties of Filipino and other foreign-trained nurses in their struggle for fair and affordable accreditation of their highly-needed skills and education,” explained Farrales. “There is a shameless lack of political will to immediately address the policy implications of nurses trapped under the LCP as a cheap substitute to not only a national day care program, but also affordable and accessible health care for elderly patients and their families in the community,” stated Farrales.

In fact, the B.C.-based Filipino Nurses Support Group (FNSG) raised the plight of Filipino nurses trapped as sources of cheap and docile labour under the LCP and the successful community-based programs of the group when Dosanjh was Premier of B.C. in 2000. A form of modern-day slavery, the LCP legislates live-in caregivers, 95.1% of whom are Filipino women, into poverty and abuse.

Despite Dosanjh’s announcement as Federal Health Minister in April this year of allotting $75 million of public funds to speed up the process of accreditation and integration of foreign-trained doctors, nurses, and other health professionals, none of these resources reached the very communities who advocate and ensure the development of these immigrant nurses on a daily basis.

Since 1995, FNSG has been lobbying all levels of government and nursing institutions for the full accreditation and reciprocity of Filipino nurses as a solution to alleviate Canada’s nursing shortage and health crisis. FNSG believes these changes will improve their community’s underdevelopment and occupational segregation as a vulnerable immigrant group in Canada.