Invisible Chains (25 page)

S
aint Vincent and the Grenadines is renowned for its historical associations with slavery and the battle to abolish it. At the height of the African slave trade, Saint Vincent functioned as a secret refuge for slaves in the Caribbean who'd either been shipwrecked during their hazardous transatlantic passage or had managed to escape from colonies in neighbouring Barbados, St. Lucia, and Grenada. In the early eighteenth century, however, even this enclave succumbed to the slave trade as French colonial settlers exploited slaves on cotton, tobacco, sugar, and coffee plantations.

All of this was abandoned more than a century ago—or so thought sixteen-year-old Chantale, who left her native Saint Vincent with her mother to visit relatives in Canada. Much of what Chantale experienced on that visit appealed to her, and she responded with excitement when she heard of an opportunity to return to Canada— this time to babysit for a Vancouver family. She didn't realize that a modern form of servitude awaited her. Yet as soon as Chantale arrived, the children's parents seized her passport and forced her to work long hours in the home, performing many chores that had little or no relationship to babysitting.

By day she was isolated in the home and toiled long hours doing every domestic chore imaginable. By night the children's father sexually assaulted her time and again. A teenager from a foreign land, she had no one to turn to for help. When the children were old
enough to attend school full-time, Chantale was sent to Montreal to another family, where she endured the same harsh conditions as before: lack of income and free time, and once again, sexual abuse. The difference was this time Chantale became pregnant as a result of repeated rape, and when the pregnancy was confirmed, the family threw her out.

After almost a decade of exploitation and sexual abuse in Vancouver and Montreal, Chantale, just twenty-six, finally received a helping hand. She was brought to a shelter in Toronto, gave birth to a healthy baby, and found safety from her exploiters.

But the scars remain. “You can see when you talk to her,” an NGO worker says of Chantale. “She acts like a child. You can see all [of] the trauma she has been suffering.”

Indisputably tragic, Chantale's story isn't unique. Representatives of NGOs have described multiple forced labour cases involving victims as young as thirteen who come from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, El Salvador, Ghana, the Philippines, and Mexico, among others. Often victims were further isolated because they were illiterate or could not speak English or French. Their movements were restricted and their documents withheld; they were threatened with deportation, denied wages, overworked, and subjected to poor living conditions. Many, but not all, were physically or sexually abused, demonstrating that the line between forced labour and sex trafficking can sometimes blur. While the factors mentioned above are potential indicators of a forced labour situation, not all must be present in a given case.

“Dirty, dangerous, and difficult”

International forced labour trafficking is a growing concern. For example, between 2005 and 2008, the RCMP's Immigration and Passport Branch (Northwest Region) received twenty-eight complaints of alleged human trafficking in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, many linked to forced labour practices. Foreign workers reportedly are sleeping on mattresses in factory storage rooms, are using garbage
cans as wash basins, and are told to hand over their bank cards to employers, supposedly for “tax purposes.”

Contrary to the expectations of many Canadians, victims of forced labour trafficking can be found across employment sectors in Western Europe and North America. These include agriculture, construction, cleaning, domestic work, and hospitality—industries that rely on “3D work,” that is, dirty, dangerous, and difficult. Such jobs are low skill, offer similarly low wages, and require large numbers of flexible seasonal workers. Forced labour is defined under international law as “work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily.” Experiencing what this legal definition meant was a harsh reality for two Filipina newcomers to Vancouver.

Slave conditions in one of Canada's wealthiest neighbourhoods

The Vancouver neighbourhood of Shaughnessy has an average household income that's more than double the city average. In 2005, two Filipina women arrived at a home in this affluent neighbourhood as part of the federal Live-In Caregiver Program, which enables women to earn money legally by providing vital services for people who can't care for themselves. In Shaughnessy, however, the Filipinas found themselves in a situation that was not at all what they'd bargained for.

The women's employer forced them to work excessive hours, took away their immigration papers, and severely mistreated them. In addition, they lacked a proper place to sleep, feared for their safety, were constantly harassed by their employer, and are believed to have been sexually abused by him. The Live-In Caregiver Program contractually binds the worker to one employer, creating an imbalance that is conducive to exploitation and diminishes the opportunity to find alternative or better employment. With no options in Canada, the two women returned to the Philippines.

Cases of this sort are all too common, especially among members of
the sizeable Filipino community who work in Canada's federal Live- In Caregiver Program. In one case, an abusive employer had allegedly mistreated at least six different caregivers over two years.

Many cases of domestic worker abuse are so outrageous, and leave the victims with so few options and protections, that they constitute a national disgrace. Records released by Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) under the
Access to Information Act
revealed a case in Quebec in which a live-in caregiver was mistreated and passed back and forth among multiple families until she eventually was abandoned in an emergency room after having suffered a stroke.

Foreign nationals have also become victims of a form of abuse labelled “live-in exploitation,” which exists outside formal immigration programs. This was the case with a young woman from Ghana we'll call Aba.

Sometime between 2002 and 2004, Aba was brought from Ghana to Canada on a visitor's visa and hired as a domestic servant for a Vancouver family. A woman in her thirties, she was treated at first like a nineteenth-century slave and later like a worthless object. Aba received no regular income or medical care during her years with the family—only room and board in their home. As well, she may have been physically mistreated.

Sister Deborah Isaacs of Sisters of the Good Shepherd, who eventually learned of Aba's situation, recounts the working conditions. “They'd taken her papers from her,” Sister Isaacs explains. “She worked [an] enormous amount of hours … The only thing she was allowed to do was go to church service a half a day a week. For her, some of the conditions were still better than Africa.”

When the family decided to immigrate to the United States, they simply abandoned Aba as they might have done with an item of furniture or clothing they no longer wanted. “When they left, they threw her out on the street,” Sister Isaacs says. “She had nothing. She had no money; she had no papers.”

Aba was directed to MOSAIC, a non-governmental organization that helps newcomers to Canada. There she met Isaacs, who quickly
saw that Aba's options were limited. “She was afraid to go back to her country,” Isaacs notes, “and she didn't know what to do … She was scared of the police.” For their part, immigration officials could do nothing to help Aba obtain legal status and remain in Canada. Then Aba vanished, and no one knows what became of her.

A false start on forced labour prosecutions

Despite forced labour allegations beginning to surface in Canada, there have yet to be any convictions for the crime. Senait Tafesse Manaye, a twenty-nine-year-old Ethiopian woman, was the alleged victim in the first human trafficking charges made under the
Criminal Code
to involve a foreign national. In May 2007, RCMP officials in Laval, Quebec, received anonymous tips from several people about alleged worker abuse. The tip-offs led to Nichan Manoukian and his wife, Manoudshag Saryboyadijan, being charged with trafficking in persons, receiving a financial or material benefit from human trafficking, and withholding travel or identity documents for the purpose of committing or facilitating trafficking. Manaye allegedly had worked for the couple for eight years as a live-in nanny, first in Lebanon and then in Canada.

According to the charges, Manaye was largely confined to the house where she worked long hours, was not allowed outside alone, and was denied access to her identity papers. In their defence, the accused couple claimed they had treated the alleged victim like family. Then without warning, on December 6, 2007, Crown prosecutor Isabelle Briand withdrew all charges against Manoukian and Saryboyadijan based on “new evidence.” No details of this evidence were made public.

Following the withdrawal of charges, the couple demanded an apology from the RCMP and, in May 2008, filed a civil lawsuit against the federal force, Laval Police, and the Government of Quebec, seeking five million dollars in damages. Two years later, the lawsuit was still pending. Meanwhile, Manaye reportedly obtained refugee status in Canada and was not sent back to Ethiopia.

“A chain gang, without the chains”

Any situation in which a worker can be isolated and controlled carries the risk of abuse, potentially leading to an intolerable master–slave relationship, as the Filipino men now known as the Elmvale 11 allegedly experienced in the summer of 2007.

The eleven men were attracted to Canada to help build two icebreakers for the Canadian Arctic for an advertised twenty-three dollars per hour, plus overtime, food, and lodging. The Canadian employer had obtained legal work permits, so the men had every reason to expect the terms would be honoured. Not only did they quit their jobs in the Philippines, but also many sold their belongings to cover their transportation costs and the recruiting agency fees, and some went deeply into debt.

Unbeknownst to the men, the project was cancelled before they'd even left Manila.

Upon arriving at Toronto's Pearson International Airport, the men were met by a woman who claimed to work for the Manila-based recruiting agency. She escorted them to a suburban Toronto home where they were confined in cramped quarters and slept four to a bed in the basement. The woman allegedly demanded their passports and work permits, then removed all telephones from the house and warned the now-confused Filipinos against attempting to contact their relatives. After having spent a week in these conditions, the men were informed that the shipbuilding arrangement had been cancelled. Instead of returning home, the men would work for a new “boss” at a company outside of the city.

Soon they found themselves at a filthy farmhouse in Elmvale—a hamlet near Barrie, Ontario, about one hundred kilometres north of Toronto. “Inside there was mud on the floor everywhere,” recalls one of the men. “We had to spend a week cleaning it up.” Their living space was cramped and food arrived only intermittently. When the workers questioned their “boss” about the situation, he retorted that he'd paid four thousand dollars for them and they should cease their complaints.

The Filipinos spent six weeks doing physical labour and menial tasks at bottling plants and on the rural estate where they were confined. The hours were horrendously long; at least two of the workers laboured on occasion for seventeen to twenty-four hours without rest. Only rarely were the workers permitted a day off, and they were never paid the wages promised. Complaints were met with threats of deportation. Finally, one worker managed to escape and contacted the local Filipino consulate, which in turn contacted the police, who launched a raid on the farm and rescued the other men.

From the perspective of the labour attaché at the Filipino consulate in Toronto, the treatment of the men entailed nothing short of slavery. “This was a chain gang without the chains,” he commented.

No charges were laid in the Elmvale 11 case, even after months of investigation. The reason cited by authorities was, once again, the narrow definition of “exploitation” in the
Criminal Code,
which differs from the
Palermo Protocol
definition that Canada had agreed to adopt. “The way exploitation is phrased in the
Criminal Code,
they have to fear for their safety or their lives,” says Constable Julie Meeks of the RCMP. In her opinion, “they just didn't have that fear.”

As of June 2010, no one in Canada has been convicted of forced labour trafficking, despite the fact that authorities continue to discover growing numbers of such cases.

Needed: A “source country” means of preventing forced labour trafficking

The federal government is starting to take steps to address the treatment of foreign workers based on a growing number of cases involving serious forms of labour exploitation.

At the international level, CIC says that “[i]mproving the integrity of the Temporary Foreign Workers Program, including worker protection measures, continues to be a priority.” CIC officers stationed in embassies and consulates worldwide are involved in preventing human trafficking “through information-sharing and
intelligence-gathering.” In 2007, the federal government announced improvements to the Temporary Foreign Workers Program, which CIC says “will increase program integrity and reduce potential worker exploitation.” While these efforts are laudable, concerns remain about the promise Canada holds for newcomers and the degree to which traffickers and profiteers misrepresent opportunities to vulnerable workers.

In October 2009, Jason Kenney, minister of citizenship and immigration, announced proposed changes to the Temporary Foreign Workers Program, including two important regulatory reforms to help protect foreign workers from mistreatment and abuse. First, officials will conduct “a more rigorous assessment of the genuineness of the job offer,” including any past violations of labour laws by the employer. Second, employers who have “provided significantly different wages, working conditions or occupations than promised” will be banned from hiring temporary foreign workers for two years.