Mehak Kapoor has spent nearly five years studying and working in child care in Ontario — part of the broader caregiver workforce in Canada that looks after children, the elderly and people with disabilities.
The 22-year-old from India is now a registered early childhood educator, spending her days caring for children from as young as three months to 10 years old. She teaches and cleans up after them, allowing many parents to go to work knowing their kids are in good hands.
But despite working in a care sector facing chronic staff shortages, Kapoor will have no choice but to stop on March 16, when her postgraduate work permit expires. She cannot extend it and has no clear path to permanent residency after recent immigration cuts made it harder for workers in caregiving roles like hers to apply.
Kapoor had hoped that after studying, gaining work experience in Canada and meeting all immigration requirements she would eventually qualify for permanent residency.
“I have done all the demands that Canada has asked,” Kapoor said. “I have studied and contributed to the economy … I have made these positive relationships with children and with families.
“I’m heartbroken that I have to leave the country and the kids that I worked with.”
Even as Canada faces a chronic shortage of care workers amid an aging population — Ontario alone will need 33,200 more nurses and 50,853 more personal support workers by 2032, the government projects — foreign care workers like Kapoor who are already working in the country are facing steep barriers to staying as Ottawa tightens immigration levels.
Kapoor is one of thousands of care workers confronting this reality as the federal government drastically cuts the number of international student visas and postgraduate work permits, shrinks the Temporary Foreign Worker Program and halts some sector-specific immigration streams, including the Home Care Worker Immigration pilot.
The result, experts and advocates warn, is that caregivers and personal support workers already in Canada and ready to work are being lost to a system that cannot afford to lose them.
The federal government’s immigration policy “doesn’t really make sense when we look at the counter-reality of growing demand for personal support workers in the workforce,” said Naomi Lightman, an associate professor of sociology at Toronto Metropolitan University who researches migration and care work.
By 2026, over 2.4 million Canadians 65 and over will require paid and unpaid continuing care support, up 71 per cent from 2011, according to a 2015 report from the Conference Board of Canada. By 2046, this number is expected to reach nearly 3.3 million.
At the same time, Canada’s child-care sector is expanding while severe labour shortages persist. An estimated 32,000 additional educators are needed to expand child care over the next five years.
“Canada was already facing a critical shortage of child-care workers,” said Candace Rennick, national secretary-treasurer of CUPE, the largest union representing child-care workers, with over 12,000 members across the country in child care.
“And these drastic cuts by the Liberal government are making that worse.”
Immigrant and racialized women are disproportionately represented among personal support workers, Lightman said, and make up the majority of that workforce in the Greater Toronto Area.
“We’re not bringing in new care workers, while at the same time the workers we essentially imported with promises (of permanent status) may now have to leave,” Lightman said, adding that the sector is already struggling to retain workers because of burnout and poor working conditions.
“It’s a lose-lose situation for clients who need care and for the migrant women doing the work.”
In December, Ottawa said it would be suspending the Home Care Workers Immigration pilot project, “to prioritize processing of existing applications,” Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada said in a statement, “until further notice.”
When asked about processing times of backlogs and existing applications, the department said in an email “it is expected to take 6 to 8 years for the Department to finalize all applications received to date through the 2025 Home Care Worker Immigration Pilots.”
This decision means that Canada will no longer have a dedicated immigration pathway for home caregivers, the first time this has happened in more than three decades, despite the country’s long-standing reliance on migrant labour to help care for an aging population.
Advocates like Diana Da Silva with the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change say migrant care workers often already face precarious work and immigration conditions. As permits expire without a pathway to permanent residency, many risk further exploitation and could become undocumented.
“Canada is facing a care crisis and the racialized migrant women holding up our care system together are being pushed out,” Da Silva said.
For many care workers, that reality has meant falling into undocumented status without a way to stay.
Jane works as a health-care aide and is among an estimated 500,000 undocumented residents struggling to survive in Canada.
She fled Uganda in 2017 but her refugee claim was denied after she arrived in Canada. Still, she has spent several years working in the shadows as a personal support worker, caring for both youth and elderly in long-term-care homes — some of the most essential work in the care sector.
She even enrolled in a medical administration program, which she hoped would propel a career in the care sector. The Star is not using Jane’s full name because of her precarious immigration status and risk of deportation.
At a panel organized by the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change last week, Jane said she often worked late without overtime pay.
“I always did what I was asked of me, because without immigration status I could not stand up for my rights at work … even if I felt unsafe or was injured,” Jane said.
Lightman of TMU warns that Canada’s immigration policy could push more migrant care workers into undocumented status, even as the government has long promoted caregiving as a path to permanent residency.
“As a caregiver, you can come to Canada to become a permanent resident,” reads a page on the Immigration Department’s website.
“The backbone of the care system is immigrant women,” Lightman said.
“If people come here under the understanding that if they work hard and do these jobs, that they will eventually have the opportunity for permanent residency, it’s cruel, unfair and dangerous to pull the rug out from under them.”
