Saturday, December 08, 2007 Roperos: Canada blues By Godofredo M. Roperos Politics Also
EARLY this week, I accompanied three persons from my hometown desiring to go to Canada as overseas workers. As usual, Consul Bob Lee was very eager to help them.
Perhaps, in so doing he could somehow help ease Canada’s need for skilled people. Like other developing nations, our Philippines nourish a rich supply of that human resource.
But from tales of Pinoy behavior and experience abroad, it seems easy to deduce a measure of impatience, wiliness and propensity to skim the surface of good and acceptable ways when it becomes important for them to achieve an end.
Some years back, I learned it was easy to obtain a Social Security System (SSS) number when one desires to do so “under the table.” It is quite important for an employable migrant to secure an SSS number before he can get a job, no matter how lowly it is.
In the Middle East, Pinoy workers were always able to come up with solutions to whatever problems they encounter. When they need a driver’s license, someone always came up with the skill to make fake driver’s licenses of the host country.
Such ingenuity should be admirable if it were not in violation of the trust and confidence of the host government. Our people, it appears, are quick to fulfill the popular saying that “necessity is the mother of invention.”
But the problem is that, rather than solve a problem, the ingenuity gave our people a bad image. One of the girls, for example, was training as care giver in Toledo City and wanted to go to Canada after finishing the course a couple of months from now.
Consul Lee said, however, that Canada has stopped the automatic acceptance of care givers from the Philippines it initiated the previous years. The reason: certain Pinoys wanting to get quick cash got into Canada fake caregivers by setting up “ghost” recruiting agencies there.
The ghost offices sent recruitment papers to the Philippines and were availed of by supposed caregivers who were unable to work as such when they reached their Canadian destination. The Canadian government had discontinued the program when the modus operandi was found out.
And the Canadian government not only made the entry of Filipino caregivers difficult, it has also become stricter in the processing of other Filipino workers’ entry into Canada.
In a sense, what some of our people did to hasten entry of more Pinoys to Canada has backfired.
