How Budget 2021 could affect the Filipino Community in Canada

How Budget 2021 could affect the Filipino Community in Canada

The Piniones-Valdez family need full-time child care for their three-year-old toddler, and before-and-after-school care for children aged 11 and 9.
(Photo supplied)

May 11, 2021

By Veronica Silva Cusi
The Philippine Reporter

$10 cap on child care, $15 minimum wage, $2.5 billion for housing.

These are the numbers that the Liberal minority is offering Canadians in its first federal budget in this pandemic. But what does Budget 2021 really mean for the immigrant Filipino-Canadians who are estimated to number close to a million per Census 2016?

For mother-of-three Essel Piniones-Valdez of Etobicoke, the cap of $10 per day on average for child care is welcome news. Almost three years ago, Valdez had to quit her job after her maternity leave because the subsidy she was getting for her then two kids was not enough. With the Piniones-Valdez family income as a couple, their share of childcare subsidy decreased shortly before she went on maternity leave for her third child.

An early childhood educator, she felt that it didn’t make sense for her to take care of other people’s children while she’s paying more than she’s earning to send her kids to child care and before-and-after school to be able to earn income.

“I will go back to work to take care of kindergarten kids, then my children will be taken care of by another ECE? That’s crazy,” she said of her former child care arrangements. “With deductions, my take-home pay won’t be enough.”

Her math and logic make sense.

According to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the gross median childcare fees for toddler in Toronto was the highest in the country 2020 at $1,578 per month.

Budget 2021 is dubbed as a post-COVID recovery plan with $101.4 billion in new spending over three years.

“This budget has two main goals. One is to support Canadians as they deal with the impact of COVID-19 pandemic, and the second is to help Canadians to recover and have a strong economic recovery,” said Minister Ahmed Hussen, Minister of Families, Children and Social Development, in an interview with The Philippine Reporter.

Hussen on May 1 met with the Filipino community in an online forum where he answered questions on how the federal budget might impact them.

Budget 2021’s promise of $10 per day on average for regulated child care spaces won’t be until the end of 2026 and everywhere else outside of Quebec. By 2022, the Budget commits to only a 50 per cent drop on the average daily cost for preschool care.

This promise of child care will also cost Canadian taxpayers — $30 billion over the next five years, and $8.3 billion ongoing for Early Learning and Child Care and Indigenous Early Learning and Child Care. The plan also calls for the support of provinces and territories.

“We are putting significant dollars over the next five years … We hope the provinces and territories can join us in this historic journey. Because too many kids are on waitlist, too many parents are prevented from working because they don’t have access to affordable child care. We need to reduce those fees, build more spaces … And we feel that the best way to deliver [on these] … is to build that system together with provinces and territories,” said Hussen.

Aside from child care, Hussen touted other programs in the budget that could help newcomers and racialized communities. These include extensions to COVID-19 recovery program, such as the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy, the Canada Emergency Rent Subsidy and Lockdown Support. These are to be extended up to September 25, 2021.

He also highlighted investments in affordable housing, including the $1.5 billion for the Rapid Housing Initiative to construct new affordable housing units for vulnerable Canadians.
In total, the federal government is investing $2.5 billion in housing, including reallocating $1.3 billion, “to speed up the construction, repair, or support of 35,000 affordable housing units across the country.”

For Nancy Quinon, who lives in a two-bedroom apartment with her three adult children and a daughter-in-law in the west end of Toronto, the billions of dollars promised, especially for affordable housing, is music to her ears. However, living in one of the most expensive cities in Canada for more than 10 years, she has doubts that any of that funding will translate to a bigger apartment or owned home for her family.

“Masaya na may ganyan plano, but maka-avail kaya tayo nyan? (It’s good we have that in the [budget] plan, but can we avail of that?),” said Quinon, who TPR interviewed last year in a study by Social Planning Toronto on a housing crisis among racialized Torontonians. “Madaming nakapila sa social housing. (There are many waiting in line for social housing.)”
According to the City of Toronto website, there are more than 79,000 in the active waiting list for subsidized housing as of the first quarter of the year. In 2020, the total in active waiting list was more than 81,000.

Piniones-Valdez, who has been renting in Toronto for 10 years, also doubts if her family can benefit from any housing program due to the long waiting list.

Budget 2021 also includes a minimum wage of $15 for workers in federally regulated sectors, such as airports and federal agencies.

The 2021 budget also includes $428.9 million over five years to streamline immigration processes through a modern immigration platform to ease out of the legacy Global Case Management System.

The budget “will support an immigration system that is easier to navigate, and more efficient in welcoming the dynamic new Canadians who add to our country’s strength,” said Chrystia Freeland, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance on her first federal budget.

Funding will start in 2021-22 with $398.5 million in remaining amortization.

There is also a total of $110.7 million over three years to support the temporary foreign worker (TFW) program and broken down as follows:

• $49.5 million to support community-based organizations offering programs and services for migrant workers,

• $54.9 million to increase inspection of employers to protect TFWs,

• $6.3 million to allow Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada to improve services and process open work permits to avoid abuse of migrant workers by their employers.. “The government has zero tolerance for any abuse of workers,” says the Budget.

Hussen also touted efforts to address racism and discrimination, this month of May being Asian Heritage Month.

There is an allotment of $172 million for Statistics Canada to collect better data by race through the Disaggregated Data Action Plan. The five-year funding will begin in 2021-22.

There is also $75 million over five years to help the Royal Canadian Mounted Police combat racism through better recruitment and training; collecting and analyzing race-based data; and engaging with Black, Indigenous, and racialized communities.

“Once again, we communicate with all Canadians that that we stand against hatred and systemic discrimination,” said Hussen.

These plans and more put Canada’s deficit to $1 trillion.

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Veronica Silva Cusi is a multimedia journalist and researcher with more than two decades of experience. She was a business journalist for 12 years with Business World in the Philippines and a journalism lecturer for 14 years at University of the Philippines. She’s been covering ethnic media in the GTA for more than a decade and also worked as editor and reporter in Singapore. She holds two master’s degrees — Communication Research and Journalism. You can follow her on Twitter @VSilvaCusi.