A Tragedy Has Made Filipinos in Canada More Visible
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The Filipino flag is displayed at a mass for victims and the Filipino community at St. Andrew's Cathedral in Victoria, B.C.
Suddenly, government workers take clearer notice of the Filipinos among them, who are not just after-hours cleaners, but also policy analysts and IT specialists. Bank clients express sympathy to Filipino tellers. Community members remember a Filipino restaurant in their neighborhood; some remember a Filipino realtor who helped them find a house. Parents condole with a Filipino teacher, and elementary school students draw the Filipino flag in class. Parishioners realize how, without Filipinos, churches would be more than half-empty.
The province of British Columbia (BC) declared a Day of Mourning on May 2, 2025. Leaders and members of the Filipino Canadian community in Victoria, the capital of BC, were invited to a session of the BC legislature in which Ministers of the Legislative Assembly expressed their shock and sorrow at the event.
Jagmeet Singh, Paul Poilievre and Mike Carney who, at the time of the incident, were in the last few days of their campaigns for the office of Prime Minister of Canada, visited and commiserated with the Filipino community. Municipalities all over Canada posted messages of sympathy and solidarity on social media.
Politicians rushed to ask their admin assistants to look up facts about Filipinos in Canada. They are finding out that there are close to one million immigrants in the country, second only in number to immigrants from India. That a Filipino, the Hon. Rechie Valdez is Minister of Small Business of Canada. The CBC wrote about her appointment in 2023: “Filipinos are arguably the most politically underrepresented group in Canadian federal politics.”
Mable Elmore, whose mother is from Cebu, was as a novelty when she was elected to the BC Provincial Legislature in 2009. In 2020, the Georgia Straight, a weekly newspaper published in Vancouver, asked: “Why was Mable Elmore kept out of the B.C. NDP cabinet when so many with less political experience made the cut?” Elmore is currently Deputy Speaker.
Canadian Premier Mark Carney, BC Premier David Eby and BC MLA Mable Elmore at the site of the Lapu Lapu Day massacre.
In an essay published in 2012 and titled Spectres of (In)visibility: Filipina/o Labour, Culture and Youth in Canada, Bonnie McElhinny, Lisa M. Davidson, John Paul C. Catungal, Ethel Tungohan and Roland Sintos Coloma wrote: “Prevalent conversations in Canadian media, academic, and politicized public spheres tend to represent and account for Filipina/os living in Canada within the tropes of victimized nanny, selfless nurse, and problematic gangster youth. These images render hypervisible in social and academic spaces certain problems facing Filipina/o communities, which are then calcified as Filipina/o stereotypes.”
These stereotypes, they note, ignore the diverse histories and experiences of Filipino immigrants in Canada. “Filipina/o communities are therefore put into the paradoxical position of being invisible and hypervisible: invisible because numerous kinds of people, problems, and achievements are ignored, and hypervisible because only the stereotypes are deemed relevant and significant for public circulation.”
Some of the stereotypes are flattering. “Filipinos are such nice people,” a bystander who survived the fatal event, was quoted as saying. “I don’t know why anyone would do this!” BC Premier David Eby said: “The Filipino community is so beautiful.” At a May 2 memorial mass in Vancouver, Eby said that Filipinos have “held us up in our hardest times, in our hospitals, in our care homes, in our schools.” People raved about Filipino food.
But indeed we are more complex than our niceness, hard work, and our pork barbecue. We are a nice and beautiful people, but we have our struggles too. Many Filipinos who come to Canada are highly skilled and well-educated, but, apart from the health care and service industry, many employment doors remain closed to them or are difficult to get into.
There is a subtle racism–one that many Canadians would deny–that would make a hiring manager choose a European over a person of color. Demands of “local experience,” make Filipinos wait for years before they can get the jobs for which they are qualified. Canada’s onerous accreditation policies and procedures ensure the continued underemployment of thousands of skilled and well-educated immigrants.
Thus, a doctor in the Philippines now makes a living filling medical forms for an insurance company. A teacher works as a greeter at Walmart, a dentist ends up as a receptionist, and an accountant works the assembly line at a bakery. All because accreditation involves not just money for courses, but also time spent in class, out of the workforce and without an income.
These days, many Filipinos who borrowed thousands of pesos, even mortgaging land, to come to Canada as students face the prospect of having to head home after their courses, instead of seeing a pathway to permanent residency, because of recent changes in laws governing international students. The pathways were very much available in 2020, when COVID hit, and Canada needed everyone they could get to work, especially the jobs that were most vulnerable to COVID infection.
I washed dishes in a hospital kitchen and took care of elderly clients for one year before I was hired as a writer for the BC public service. Never mind that when I arrived, I already had over 30 years’ experience in teaching, training, and curriculum development. I had graduated from the University of the Philippines and had an MA from an American university.
This is not to denigrate skilled labor and work in the care industry. But Canada needs to see us not just as service workers and health care providers but also as artists, scholars, engineers, musicians, project managers, leaders. Not just as a ready pool for low-paying jobs Canadians are not keen to do. And we want to be at the table when important decisions are being made.
In a recent article in Positively Filipino, Mona Lisa Yuchengco listed 62 Americans of Filipino origin holding office in 15 states. California alone, with a population of 39.4 million, has 38 Filipino Americans at various levels of political office. Canada, with a population of 41 million, boasts of only three elected Filipino officials. In addition to Elmore and Valdez, Stephanie Valenzuela was elected to the Montreal City Council in 2021.
Children of an elementary school in Victoria raised funds for the community with a bake sale.
A lot of the work required to get there starts with us, Filipino Canadians. We need to overcome the inferiority and the lack of assertiveness that is partly the heritage of our colonial history. We need to stop pulling down those that rise above us and excel because of traditional values that dictate everyone should fit in and not stand out. We also need to overcome the fatalism that makes us accept indignities, inequities and injustices without complaint, and the attitude that a low salary in Canada is “tama na” (enough) because it converts to much more in pesos.
These are some of the conversations we would like to see happen after the Lapu Lapu Day tragedy. A teenager, born in Canada to Filipino parents, asking his or her parents for more stories about the homeland, or even lessons in a Filipino language. A manager, asking an employee or employees to tell him more about their lives before coming to Canada, and the struggles they are facing here. A neighbor, asking a Filipino family what “Lapu Lapu” refers to, sparking a mini discussion on Philippine history and culture. Business leaders and employers, finding ways to tap the potential of Filipino Canadian workers, supported by lawmakers revisiting the ways they can make Canada validate and affirm more easily the skills, talents, and experience that immigrants bring to this country.
Canada needs to see us not just as service workers and health care providers but also as artists, scholars, engineers, musicians, project managers, leaders.
For now, while we grieve, we are also basking in a visibility born of tragedy. May the visibility we currently enjoy bear fruit: fruits of a greater compassion and understanding for and interest in all immigrants; a greater appreciation of what immigrants contribute to this great country; a greater awareness of the needs and struggles of immigrant communities and a commitment on the part of leaders to address those needs. It should not take another Lapu Lapu Day massacre to make our fellow Canadians really see and value the new Canadians that we are, in their midst.
Meyen Quigley is a writer based in Victoria, British Columbia. Originally from Iloilo, she lived and worked in Sudan, Pakistan, Turkey, and New York before settling down in Canada with her husband Kevin and children Gabriel and Megan.
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