The Filipino shuffle

>> Pencil pushers delay while the sick await imported care

by GEORGE MADDUX

After Mark Litovski's 85-year-old sister Helen suffered a stroke, he tried to fit her into a nursing home but found they couldn't fill her needs. So in 1998 he filled out the requisite triplicates, signed on the mandatory dotted lines and did whatever else he thought necessary to bring in a foreign domestic to tend to her. The process should have been a day on the beach for Litovski, who's described as a volunteer by staffers of the Verdun-based Magical Filipina domestic agency that specializes in recruiting domestics. Litovski's nephew, Harvey Litvak, runs the agency.

The first step of the process was to wait for the pencil pushers to perform a routine validation procedure to prove that his sister truly needed the services of a foreign domestic. The process usually requires six weeks. But due to understaffing and a move to another office, the feds ended up taking nine months to get past the first hurdle.

Finally, after several more federal and provincial bodies did the time-consuming rubber stamping, the feds eventually sent a letter to Helen's would-be caregiver Luz Marie Diez at her Singapore employer. They asked her to get a letter of release from her current employer.

Diez's Singapore employers not only refused to provide the document, they fired her. She was deported from Singapore to the Phillipines last April.

Now Diez has to start her entire application anew, meaning she must wait another six months to get back to the interview stage. Meanwhile Helen remains without a caregiver, as any replacement would have to sign a waiver agreeing to leave upon Diez's arrival, something others have been reluctant to do.

Litovski says his research has uncovered many other mysterious decisions or bureaucratic cock-ups in the process. He cites the case of Marie Theresa Oliveros, who remains in Hong Kong because she's too scared to ask her employer for a letter of release, which she fears will result in her expulsion to Manila. "There's no reason for federal Immigration to ask for it, because they already have a copy of her two-year work record that proves that she did the job," says Litovski. He estimates that another 10 women who want to come here under the domestic caregiver program are stuck in Hong Kong under similar circumstances.

An Immigration Canada official tells the Mirror that such a letter of release shouldn't be a reason to hold a candidate back, but says government policy is to not comment on specific cases without a waiver of confidentiality signed by the applicant.

Mary Jane Bayang is another Hong-Kong-based Filipino domestic whose file, according to Litovski, has been mishandled by authorities. She was told that her medical would take a full four months to process and during the delay her Hong Kong visa elapsed, forcing her to restart the lengthy process of trying to come to Canada anew from the Phillipines. "Now she's on this 18-month waiting list because Human Resources Canada took three times longer than they should to process her file," says Litovski.

Litovski suspects inefficiency or corruption in foreign Canadian consular offices as the root of the slow-motion bureaucracy. "I strongly suspect that [foreign-based Canadian consular authorities] are getting paid off by competitors to accelerate other files process."