Authored by Lijing Cao, Canadian Immigration Lawyer, Bellissimo Law Group
[Contact email for editorial communication only: allyljcao@gmail.com]
This article was originally published by Law360 Canada, part of LexisNexis Canada Inc.
Canada’s productivity debate usually focuses on taxes, capital and permits, but care availability is also an economic variable. In 2024, 59.5% of Canadian child care centres were operating at maximum capacity, 77.3% had active waitlists and 86.4% reported difficulty filling vacant positions.
The unpaid care burden is also large enough to affect labour supply directly. In 2022, 13.4 million Canadians aged 15 and older provided unpaid care to children or to adults and youth with long-term conditions or disabilities, and 66% of non-retired sandwiched caregivers said those responsibilities affected their employment or job-seeking. More than half of women aged 15 and older provided some form of care in 2022.
That matters because the Bank of Canada has described high labour-force participation, especially among women, as one of Canada’s key economic strengths, while identifying productivity as the country’s main weakness. The productivity slowdown affecting Canada’s economic growth in recent years may be linked, at least indirectly, to the declining accessibility and quality of care services in our society.
Unfortunately, Canada’s current caregiver architecture is fragmented. The older Home Child Care Provider Pilot and Home Support Worker Pilot closed to new applicants on 17 June 2024. The newer Home Care Worker Immigration pilots are now listed as closed, and IRCC announced in December 2025 that intake would be paused until further notice and would not reopen in March 2026.
Outside Quebec, there is currently no broad, open overseas LMIA route for in-home caregivers. IRCC’s caregiver work permit page states a person outside Canada cannot apply through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program if the job is outside Quebec, and Employment and Social Development Canada notes that, for LMIA applications filed on or after 18 June 2019 with the intention of hiring a caregiver from overseas for a position outside Quebec, IRCC will not issue a work permit to the foreign national. Quebec, by contrast, can still use the Temporary Foreign Worker Program for this purpose.
There is a thin set of legal pathways for a country facing both child care scarcity and population aging. Statistics Canada projects that growth in the population aged 85 and older will be especially rapid from 2031 to 2050, increasing demand for caregiving, long-term care, health care and home care supports.
Hong Kong offers a different model. In 2024, Hong Kong had 368,000 foreign domestic helpers, equal to 9.6% of the local workforce. Its system uses a standard employment contract, provides online application channels and says it normally takes about four to six weeks to process a new helper application once all necessary documents are received.
The effects on the labour market are striking. The 2025 statistical paper from Hong Kong’s Legislative Council Secretariat reports that, in 2023, only 45.6% of married women with children aged 14 and under were in the labour market if they did not have live-in foreign domestic helpers, compared with 82.3% if they did. Peer-reviewed research likewise found that hiring foreign domestic helpers increases married women’s labour-force participation, increases time spent on paid work and reduces women’s share of housework.
Hong Kong’s experience is also relevant to elder care. The same Legislative Council paper states that, as the population ages, helpers’ caring duties have extended from children to elderly persons, and the share of elderly households hiring helpers has risen materially since 1997.
The first takeaway for Canada is scale and predictability. Hong Kong treats household caregiving as standing labour-market infrastructure rather than a stop-start pilot. Canada does not need Hong Kong’s exact numbers, but it does need a stable overseas caregiver pathway that families and workers can rely on instead of a system defined by closed pilots, paused intake and narrow temporary alternatives.
The second takeaway is administrative simplicity. Hong Kong’s model is legible: one mandatory contract, a clear process and published processing benchmarks, alongside licensing rules for employment agencies and a capped job-seeker commission. Canada may move toward a national caregiver contract that aligns wages with provincial standards, hours, rest, accommodation standards where live-in arrangements are genuinely chosen, recruiter-fee prohibitions and complaint procedures.
The third takeaway is complementarity. Overseas caregivers are not substitutes for daycare centres or long-term care homes; they are complements to them. That is an inference, but it is a strong one: when public child care is already near capacity, when waitlists are widespread and when unpaid caregiving is already affecting employment, additional lawful in-home care options should ease some pressure on centre-based spaces and help more adults remain attached to work.
Canada may borrow Hong Kong’s access, not its precarity. Hong Kong’s rules require helpers to live in the employer’s residence, bar them from taking other employment, generally tie them to a specific job with a named employer for a limited period, and exclude time spent in Hong Kong as an overseas domestic helper from “ordinary residence” for right-of-abode purposes.
Canada has already moved away from the old live-in model. The Live-in Caregiver Program is closed to new applicants, and the Temporary Foreign Worker Program may refuse to process LMIA applications from employers seeking in-home caregivers exclusively on a live-in basis. Any Canadian expansion should therefore keep live-out work as the default and allow workers to move between approved caregiving employers.
In practical terms, Ottawa may consider creating a permanent overseas caregiver stream, restore predictable intake and pair the system with tighter recruiter oversight. Hong Kong already requires employment agencies to be licensed and caps the legally prescribed commission at 10% of the worker’s first-month salary after successful placement. Canada should at least match that level of clarity while enforcing its own rule that employers and recruiters cannot pass recruitment fees on to the worker.
The economic case is straightforward. If Canada improves lawful access to overseas caregivers under rights-protective conditions, more families, especially women balancing paid work with child care or elder care, should be able to stay in the workforce or increase their hours. As an inference from the Canadian and Hong Kong evidence, that would relieve some pressure on the daycare system, expand effective labour supply and support productivity growth over time.
