Pt 1: Caregiver & Minister - Magdalene Gordo and Richelyn Tongson have a long list of complaints about Liberal MP Ruby Dhalla and her family. They say they were hired to work as caregivers for her mother. They say they had their passports held, they worked long hours -- sometimes 10 to 14 hours-a-day without overtime at less then minimum wage and they were forced to do work outside their job descriptions as nannies such as wash cars, shine shoes and clean the family's chiropractic clinics. They also allege that the Dhalla family failed to get official approval for them to work and live in the home ... approval required under the Federal Government's Live-In Caregiver Program. They say it was all enough to make them quit.

Pt 2: Naming Nurses - Manitoba's College of Registered Nurses has a standing policy of occasionally publishing the names of nurses who have been disciplined or censured for having drug or alcohol problems. The College says it does this in the interest of transparency and the public good and that the public has a compelling interest in the matter because people entrust nurses with their health and safety.

Pt 3: Emotion: Moisi and Rebick - The global financial crisis has ignited some powerful emotions. Dismay from people who have lost their homes or their jobs. Fear from those who worry they might be next. And anger, often directed at the corporate executives that many people blame for causing the crisis in the first place.

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Today's guest host was Bob McKeown.

It's Friday May 8th.

The House of Commons wants Canadian athletes to wear seal skin on their Olympic uniforms to protest the European Union's ban on seal products

Currently, Not to be outdone, the Canadian asbestos industry offered to manufacture jock straps and support bras for Canada's Olympians.

This is the Current.

Part One: Caregiver & Minister

Magdalene Gordo and Richelyn Tongson have a long list of complaints about Liberal MP Ruby Dhalla and her family. They say they were hired to work as caregivers for her mother. They say they had their passports held, they worked long hours -- sometimes 10 to 14 hours-a-day without overtime at less then minimum wage and they were forced to do work outside their job descriptions as nannies such as wash cars, shine shoes and clean the family's chiropractic clinics. They also allege that the Dhalla family failed to get official approval for them to work and live in the home ... approval required under the Federal Government's Live-In Caregiver Program. They say it was all enough to make them quit.

What's more, Magdalene Gordo claims that when she went back to the Dhalla home to collect her belongings and her paycheque, she was confronted by Ruby Dhalla. We aired a clip.

A third foreign worker has recently come forward to echo these complaints. Ms. Dhalla denies the allegations they've made. On Wednesday, she stepped down from her post as the Liberal Party's critic for Youth and Multiculturalism. and she has asked the Ethics Commissioner to look into the matter.

Rightly or wrongly, the story has thrust Ruby Dhalla into the political spotlight. But it also raises larger questions about what some people say are systemic problems with the Live-in Caregiver Program itself.

Jason Kenney is the Federal Minister of Immigration and Multiculturalism. His department oversees the Live-In Caregiver Program and we reached him in Washington.

The Current put in several requests for an interview with Ruby Dhalla...so far, no response.

Caregiver Activist

For years, people like Pura Velasco have been lobbying the Federal Government to change it's Live-in Caregiver Program. She's a former domestic worker who's now an organizer with the Caregivers Action Centre, an organization that advocates on behalf of women employed through the Live-In Caregiver Program. Pura Velasco was in Toronto.

Naming Nurses - Lawyer

Manitoba's College of Registered Nurses has a standing policy of occasionally publishing the names of nurses who have been disciplined or censured for having drug or alcohol problems. The College says it does this in the interest of transparency and the public good and that the public has a compelling interest in the matter because people entrust nurses with their health and safety.

But the Manitoba Nurses Union has recently passed a resolution calling on the College to stop the practice of naming nurses with drug and alcohol problems. Sandi Mowat is the President of the Nurses' Union. We heard from her.

And she's not the only one who thinks the policy of naming nurses with drug or alcohol problems should be changed. Mark Toews is a lawyer who specializes in employment and professional disciplinary issues. He has represented nurses who were faced with the possibility of having their names made public because of an addiction problem. And Mark Toews was in Winnipeg.

Naming Nurses - College

And for the College of Registered Nurses of Manitoba's view, we were joined by Sue Neilson. She's the College's Executive Director and she was in Winnipeg.

Naming Nurses - Ethics

What makes this such a difficult issue is that there are two compelling interests in direct competition with each other ... personal privacy and public safety. Kerry Bowman has been in our studio listening in and weighing his thoughts on the issue. He's a bioethicist at the University of Toronto.

Music Bridge

Artist: Steve Dawson
Cut: CD8 "Photograph"
CD: "We Belong to the Gold Coast"
Label: Black Hen Music
Spine #: BHCD 0030

Emotion: Moisi and Rebick

The global financial crisis has ignited some powerful emotions. Dismay from people who have lost their homes or their jobs. Fear from those who worry they might be next. And anger, often directed at the corporate executives that many people blame for causing the crisis in the first place. We aired a clip.

To a lot of people, those emotional reactions probably seem like a pretty understandable response to what has happened. But to Dominique Moisi, they're also cause for concern. He's a visiting professor at Harvard University's Department of Government and the author of a new book called The Geopolitics of Emotion. He was in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Judy Rebick has a different take on how powerful emotions might animate our politics. She is the CAW-Sam Gindin Chair in Social Justice and Democracy at Ryerson University. She's also the founder of rabble.ca. And her new book is called Transforming Power: From the Personal to the Political. Judy Rebick was in our Toronto studio.

Emotion: Alvaro Vargas Llosa

Judy Rebick cited Latin America as a region where strong emotions have produced positive political developments. We aired a few examples of what she was talking about.

So Lula in Brazil. Chavez in Venezuela. Morales in Bolivia. Some see signs of hope. But Alvaro Vargas Llosa has a different view of the situation in Latin America. He's a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute and the author of Liberty for Latin America. He was in Washington.

Last Word - Nanny

Earlier in the program, we looked at the allegations being leveled at Liberal MP Ruby Dhalla by two former live-in caregivers and the alleged flaws in the Federal Government's Live-In Caregiver program.

We wanted to leave you with some thoughts about how that program looks from the other side. About 25 per cent of Philippinos work overseas. And the remittences they send back home make up about 10 per cent of the Philippine's annual gross domestic product.

Earlier this year, we aired a documentary by the CBC's Karin Wells that examined this issue. She was in Manilla last year, where she met a woman named Cathy who was just 10 days away from leaving her husband, her two children and her accounting job to go and work as a live-in caregiver in Canada. We played an excerpt from that documentary.