Domestic Worker Activism: Women of Colour as Household Employees

Canadian Immigration Policies and Domestic Workers

Author: Leena Hussein, MI Candidate

Canada’s immigration policy in the early half of the twentieth century permitted the exclusion of any races “deemed unsuited to the climate or requirements of Canada”.1 During this time, Canada advertised for female domestic workers from the United Kingdom and Western Europe, and in exchange for six months of live-in domestic service they received landed immigration status.2 In contrast, due to the racist immigration policy, Canada had very few people from the Caribbean, but most of those that did come declared themselves as domestic workers. In 1954, the Toronto Negro Citizenship Association, led by Barbadian Canadian Donald Moore and supported by workers’ unions such as the United Automobile Workers, sent a delegation to Ottawa to encourage the federal government to amend its immigration policy by allowing Black people from the British Caribbean to come to Canada.3

A year later, Canada permitted “100 ‘colored’ women” from the Caribbean entry into the country as domestic workers, a decision made to assist with maintaining the country’s trade and investment in the British Caribbean,4 which would eventually include the West Indian Domestic Scheme. Between 1955-1967, 2,250 Caribbean women came to Canada as domestic workers and received landed immigration status after one year of domestic service.5 However, unlike their white counterparts from 50 years earlier, if the women were deemed unsuitable, their home country would need to pay for their return to the Caribbean.6 Check out some of the resources below for more information on the West Indian Domestic Scheme.

Back to Top

 

Endnotes

  1. The Immigration Act, SC 1910, c 27, s 38(c). https://www.canadiana.ca/view/oocihm.9_07184/2.
  2. Melanie Knight, "Black Women’s Small Businesses as Historical Spaces of Resistance," in Working Women in Canada: An Intersectional Approach, ed. Leslie Nichols (Toronto: Women’s Press, 2019), 207. https://librarysearch.library.utoronto.ca/permalink/01UTORONTO_INST/blpd0s/alma991106670264706196.
  3. “Groups Present Views to Harris: Lift Bars on Negro Immigration, Ottawa Urged,” The Globe and Mail, 1954 Apr 28, p. 9. http://myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/login?qurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.proquest.com%2Fhistorical-newspapers%2Fgroups-present-views-harris%2Fdocview%2F1289148022%2Fse-2%3Faccountid%3D14771.
  4. Abigail B. Bakan and Daiva Stasiulis, “Foreign Domestic Worker Policy in Canada and the Social Boundaries of Modern Citizenship,” Science & Society 58, no. 1 (1994): 12-13. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40403381.
  5. Frances Henry, “The West Indian Domestic Scheme in Canada,” Social and Economic Studies 17, no. 1 (1968): 83. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27856309.
  6. Bakan and Stasiulis, “Foreign Domestic Worker Policy in Canada and the Social Boundaries of Modern Citizenship”, 13.

 

Back to Top

Additional Resources

Back to Top