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Hit hard by COVID-19, Filipino Canadians grapple with added pressure to send money abroad
“The majority of the people that we talked to in our focus groups, as well as in our interviews, had lost employment or had decreased hours,” says Mauriene Tolentino, the Filipino youth fellowship co-ordinator at the Urban Alliance on Race Relations, a non-profit group.In its first-ever labour force survey featuring race-based data in early August, Statistics Canada noted the labour force participation rate among Filipino Canadians was down a whopping 7.5 percentage points between July 2019 and July 2020.The steep decline suggests that “a relatively large proportion of Filipino Canadians who lost employment as a result of COVID-19 have at least temporarily left the labour force rather than look for new work,” Statistics Canada said.But even