Another chance for Melca

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by George Maddux

The fight to allow a former Filipino domestic worker to remain in Canada appears to be a step closer to victory. Melca Salvador, who was dismissed after employers learned that she was pregnant, had been refused at all levels in her attempts to get permission to stay in Canada. But now Salvador's attorney, William Sloan, has sent in a new and beefed-up demand for an exemption on humanitarian grounds.

"With friendly interventions here and there and with public pressure, the authorities are looking at it," says Sloan. "But the fact that she applied doesn't mean that it's time for celebration yet." However Immigration Canada has not budged on demands to change the live-in caregiver program, which sees people from other countries earn $271 a week for 49 hours of domestic work with the spectre of arbitrary dismissal and deportation hovering over every sweep of the broom.

Yet Tess Tesalona of the Immigrant Workers' Centre believes that a positive result in Salvador's application will stiffen the resolve of other program participants whom the government wants to boot out for failing to work as domestics for two of their first three years here. "Many people are watching, and those in the same situation will now definitely come forward. This case will give them courage." She says another program participant who, like Salvador, had given birth to a Canadian child, recently obeyed orders and returned to the Philippines.