TORONTO, Canada - They migrate in droves. Every year, thousands of nannies from the Philippines arrive in Canada, often armed with nothing but some training in care-giving skills, a passport, a suitcase and a dream.

For Jocelyn Dulnuan, 27, a native of a farming community in Hingyon, Ifugao, the dream ended too soon. Dulnuan was found dead inside her employer's house in Mississauga, Ontario on October 1, 2007. While police probe the gruesome murder, her family and friends worked diligently to raise funds to return her body to the Philippines.

An educated woman with a degree in Criminology, she left her husband and one-year-old kid to work in Hong Kong in 2005 as a domestic helper, until she heard the buzz about the Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP) in Canada. Dulnuan learned that if she could work for two full years in a Canadian household within a three-year period, she could become a landed immigrant and bring her family to Canada.

According to Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC), the LCP is meant to fill up the country's shortage of nannies, a job Canadians are unwilling to do. Over 100,000 Filipinos, about 85 percent of whom are women, have come to Canada as caregivers, making the Philippines the main supplier of nannies to Canada. Many of them are trained nurses. The CIC has cited the Filipinos' ability to speak and understand English and high level of education as factors in their favor.

In the 2006 CIC report, 6,244 workers were admitted under this program, with 77 percent of them from the Philippines. At least 1,528 Filipino live-in caregivers were granted permanent resident status.

Despite the promising statistics, LCP does not offer an easy life.

Leslie, 42, arrived in Canada in January 2007 under the program. A teacher and mother of three, she left the Philippines to help out her husband who works as a seasonal laborer. The Zambales native is taking care of a year-old baby in Toronto.

Said Leslie: ?Who does not want to return to one's own country? But life is hard in the Philippines. There are no jobs. I have to sacrifice some more to give my family a decent life.?

Fellowship with other Filipinos and caregivers helps ease Leslie's depression, as do regular phone calls home. In many cases, caregivers share an apartment, an arrangement that provides them with a surrogate family and divides the cost of rent.

Live-in caregivers like Leslie, are paid minimum wage, approximately C$850 or P35,700 a month, minus C$325 or P13,650 for room and board as well as other deductions. It is hardly enough to support her family back home, she said.

Despite that, Canada remains an attractive place for live-in caregivers, said Prof. Denise Spitzer, the University of Ottawa's Canada Research Chair in Gender, Migration and Health.

Spitzer is presently conducting a study called ?The Land of Milk and Honey?? analyzing what has happened to the thousands of mostly Filipino women who have come to Canada under the auspices of the LCP. Filipinos in Canada are considered one of the highly-educated and the fourth largest visible minority community but the deskilling of their profession has led many women to extreme desperation, the professor said.

?A lot of people who are already professionals in the Philippines are leaving because they can't support their families sufficiently with the wages they're making. As a result, a lot of university-educated individuals are working as nannies in private households in Canada,? she said.

The LCP has recently come under formal scrutiny by Filipino women advocates in Canada, including the CIC for its tendency to exploit women.

Under the LCP, women who wish to have their status converted to landed immigrant must work as live-in caregivers for at least 24 months. This live-in arrangement has exposed them to abuses, according to Intercede, a Toronto-based non-government organization advocating the rights of domestic workers.

?The caregiver is often at the mercy of her employer,? said program manager Columbia Diaz of Intercede, an agency helping domestic workers and new immigrants in Canada. ?There are so many abuses being reported to us such as non-payment of overtime, holiday and vacation pay, excessive hours of work, non-issuance of a Record of Employment and pay slips and degrading treatment,? said Diaz. In 2006 alone, she noted, at least 5,804 live-in caregivers sought the help of Intercede with various problems arising from their work. These include ?catastrophic illnesses? and other health-related problems arising from stress and the emotional impact of family separation, as well as the physical demands of working long hours.

Diaz noted that many caregivers suffer quietly in isolation, often cowed into silence by employers who threaten them with deportation and calls to the police. ?Many of them are unable to complain or defend themselves as a result of their temporary status or contractual situations. But they remain hopeful,? she said.

If advocacy groups in Canada like SIKLAB-Canada and the National Alliance of Philippine Women in Canada had their way, the LCP program would be scrapped. The groups describe it as ?a modern type of slavery.? In a statement, they condemned LCP as an ?anti-woman and racist policy that sentences live-in caregivers to a lifetime of domestic work, cleaning, and other service sector work, stealing their dignity and stripping them of their previous work experience and education.?

These groups are calling for the scrapping of the LCP. The Canadian government, they argue, must remove its mandatory live-in requirement and allow workers to enter as permanent residents to prevent abuse and exploitation.

Diaz wants a review of the program. ?We are pushing for the Canadian government to admit these live-in caregivers with a landed immigrant status to minimize, if not eliminate, abuse of these foreign domestic workers.? She noted that these advocacies have been supported by the United Nations' Convention of the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.

Despite stories of abuse in host countries, the Philippines remains the number one exporter of labor in the world, according to Spitzer's study. Over eight million overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) are in at least 168 countries. It is estimated that 2,000 Filipinos leave the Philippines every day to work abroad.

Central Bank statistics show that dollar remittances from OFWs amounted to $12.8 billion dollars in 2006. The bulk of remittances came from the US, the United Kingdom, Italy, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Japan, and Hong Kong.

Such figures continue to fuel the hopes of millions of OFWs who, like Dulnuan, dreamt of sending their family a taste of the good life in a box. They never thought they could come home in one. Women's Feature Service