By Michelle Gamage | The Tyee
B.C.’s Hospital Employees’ Union is warning that around 500 of its members may lose their jobs this year due to changes in federal immigration policies.
The HEU represents 60,000 members working in hospitals, health clinics, care homes, corporate offices and supply warehouses. Members work directly with patients and long-term care residents, in support services, technical, clerical and trades areas.
The entire health-care sector is facing chronic staffing shortages. HEU members employed as, for example, dietary workers, housekeepers and care aides are asked to work some of the most overtime hours out of all hospital staff due to those shortages, says Caelie Frampton, an HEU spokesperson.
In 2024 the federal government halved the number of spots available in B.C.’s provincial nominee program, shrinking it to 4,000 positions from 8,000.
The provincial nominee program offers a simplified way to obtain permanent residency in Canada.
To get a job or to study in Canada, a foreign national needs to get a work visa or student visa. This process usually requires the support of an employer or school. The provincial nominee program allows the province to select people who have already been granted visas and who are working in certain industries, such as health care, to be fast-tracked for permanent residency.
Getting a job with a health authority was “known as a pathway to citizenship,” Frampton said. “We saw lots of folks getting jobs with the health authorities as a means to stay here.”
But then the changes came down.
Now, 395 HEU members who work for Fraser Health and 118 members who work for Vancouver Coastal Health are looking at losing their jobs this year, Frampton said.
“No other pathways to permanent residency are quick. Applying for different methods [of immigration] could take years. Either this has to change before everyone’s visas expire or — it’s not good,” she added.
In an emailed statement the Ministry of Health said Premier David Eby was frustrated with the cuts, that they were “not in B.C.’s interest” and that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada has the “sole authority” to say how many provincial nominee program spots B.C. gets in a year.
“We recognize that internationally educated health professionals and other non-clinical staff play an important role in meeting B.C.’s health human resource needs,” the statement said. To recruit and retain these workers the province is focusing on things within its jurisdiction, like streamlining credential assessment for internationally educated health professionals, it added.
Used as political pawns
“People are out of options and feeling like they’re going to have to leave the country,” Frampton said.
Filipino health-care workers are feeling helpless, worried, confused and like they’re being used as political pawns, said Kristina Corpin-Moser, project director of the Filipino Canadian Community & Cultural Society of BC.
“Every week there’s an immigration change,” Corpin-Moser said, whether it’s provincial nominee program spots being halved, settlement services being gutted or the federal government slashing immigration numbers.
In urban centres there are still some services available, Corpin-Moser said, but in rural communities “you have no settlement services to attract people or help them integrate into these communities.”
Blanket cuts across the sector affect racialized immigrants the most and reinforce harmful xenophobic and racist views, Corpin-Moser said, for example that immigrants are to blame for societal problems.
The International Experience Canada program, which lets young Australians have working holidays in Canada, hasn’t seen similar cuts, she added. The program allows young adults from many countries to come to Canada on working holidays, but Australia and Finland are the only two countries with no cap on total working visas issued.
Corpin-Moser said she’s already spoken with care aides and administrative staff who have been affected by these cuts.
Filipino health-care workers, who make up a “huge” chunk of the workforce, are facing burnout due to the industry’s chronic staffing shortages, trauma from the COVID-19 pandemic and struggles to find work where they can use their full skill set.
“People came to this country on the implied promise of PR and now they’re in limbo,” she said. “When legal pathways to immigration are taken away, it’ll likely create illegal immigration.”
That creates a workforce vulnerable to exploitation.
“In the absence of legitimate federal programs there will be high levels of exploitation and vulnerability in the community,” Corpin-Moser said. “People already prey on hope with recruiters making claims about how easy it is to access PR. That’s a big part of the ‘immigration consulting’ underbelly.”
It’s not just cuts to the provincial nominee program that are throwing people into limbo.
Federal changes to immigration have also made it “more and more difficult” to get employer support for work permits, said Amanda Aziz, a staff lawyer with the Migrant Workers Centre, a non-profit that does legal advocacy for migrant workers in B.C.
Aziz said cuts to immigration services and to the provincial nominee program are “unfortunate and short-sighted.”
‘A lot of chaos’
Frampton said she recently spoke with an HEU member who doesn’t know what the future holds after investing tens of thousands of dollars and years of her life working towards permanent residency through the provincial nominee program.
The member came to Canada six years ago as a student and spent $50,000 to go to school, Frampton said. She was granted a three-year work permit and even went back to school two years ago, spending another $10,000, to study to be a care aide so she’d be eligible for the provincial nominee program and therefore permanent residency. She was given a full-time position to work at Purdy Pavilion, a long-term care facility at UBC Hospital, this past fall. Full-time work is needed to apply for the provincial nominee program.
When she finally went to apply for the provincial nominee program, she was told there would be no more spots made available, Frampton said.
“The changes made to the federal immigration system caused a lot of chaos and we’re just starting to see the impacts,” she said.
“The irony is these changes were made because the federal government was saying the amount of immigration was putting stress on the system. Now we’re seeing how the health-care workers who make the system work are going to have to leave,” Frampton said.
“The health-care system needs more workers, not less,” Frampton added. “These workers are here, they’re trained for the positions, they’re working in the health-care system already and should be allowed to stay.”
After getting 8,000 provincial nominee program spots for 2024, B.C.’s Health Ministry asked the federal government for 11,000 spots for 2025, the ministry said.
“That’s 11,000 skilled workers needed to meet current demands,” Corpin-Moser said. And even then, “advocates within the sector already said that number was too low to meet the current demand.”
Instead the province got 4,000 spots.
Corpin-Moser said the province is doing a lot of work in trying to accredit education of immigrants in other countries. More than 70 per cent of immigrants come here “with advanced degrees, or multiple advanced degrees,” she added.
Frampton said some HEU members were told by the health authority that employed them that provincial nominee program spots were being prioritized for nurses and doctors.
That’s frustrating, because dietary, housekeeping and care aide workers are among the top 10 occupations in hospitals currently being asked to work the most overtime because of staffing shortages, Frampton said.
In its emailed statement the Health Ministry said that each health authority would need to choose who is selected for the provincial nominee program spots “based on its own unique and dynamic staffing needs and priorities.”
Right now it feels like the provincial and federal governments are at odds, Corpin-Moser said.
“When they work in opposition to one another the real people who lose out are those who immigrated here to be frontline workers. We need to do away with the notion that cuts could be helpful to any sector,” Corpin-Moser said.
