In Canada, Zoe Baird Would Have Found Help : Families: Across the border, professional parents can hire full-time child-care workers who are competent, loving and, above all, legal.

Not to sound holier-than-thou, but I am a working mother who has actually found a legal caregiver for my son, and I even pay the required taxes on the woman’s salary.

How did I pull off this extraordinary feat?

It wasn’t cheap, but it was easy--because I happen to live in Canada, not the United States.

The Zoe Baird incident has graphically illustrated one of the central problems facing working mothers in America: There is not enough competent, loving, legal , full-time child care to go around.

As anyone who has ever looked for a nanny in the United States knows, most people willing to do such work are non-Americans. Even if a prospective U.S. employer wants to hire a legal immigrant--and if the employer is willing to pay proper taxes on the nanny’s salary to boot--it’s hard to find any applicants except illegal immigrants, who have no Social Security numbers and who want to be paid off the books.

Not in Canada.

Here, there is a formal program tailored to the needs of professional women and men who can afford to hire full-time child care--and who don’t want to become lawbreakers in the process.

In the wake of the Baird fiasco, Americans seeking to address their country’s child-care crisis might consider the Canadian model.

“I think it would probably work in America,” says James Dorcy, senior government relations associate with the Federation for American Immigration Reform and previously a longtime official with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Canada and the United States are, after all, similar in their cultures, educational levels and economic makeup. The main relevant difference, says Dorcy, is that the United States already has a vast pool of illegal immigrants, who have driven the price of domestic work to abysmal levels. Canada has fewer illegal workers, and the labor market for domestics hasn’t been thus distorted.

In Canada, however, as in America, it is a fact of life that most established citizens don’t want to work as nannies and maids. So, to fill this gap in the labor market, Canada put a “foreign domestics” program on the books in 1981. Now, it is known as the Live-In Caregiver Program.

A hypothetical example shows how it works:

Suppose Aida Sanchez is a Filipina living in Manila, eager to come to Canada to improve her lot in life. (Most of the foreign domestics who have come to Canada in the past decade have, in fact, been Filipinas and Jamaicans.) Sanchez is well-educated and speaks English well, and she has heard about the Live-In Caregiver Program and likes the sound of it.

Under the program, Sanchez moves to Canada on a special visa, lives under her employer’s roof for two years and does household chores--as a maid, a nanny, a companion for the elderly--during that time.

At the end of two years, she is free to apply for permanent residence in Canada--and she’ll almost certainly get it.

That last point is a big drawing card for foreigners, and there’s nothing comparable to it in the United States. America has an au pair program in which non-Americans also can come, live with their employers for two years and do household chores--but at the end of their stay, they are required to go back whence they came.

In Canada, by contrast, the vast majority of the foreigners who arrive under the Live-In Caregiver Program get the Canadian equivalent of America’s “green card” after two years of undeniably hard, low-paid domestic work. And while they wait and work, they get the same generous Canadian social benefits that all of Canada’s legal residents get--free health care, unemployment compensation (and the right to stay in Canada) if they’re laid off, and the guarantee of a government pension in their old age.

Once the domestics are full-fledged residents, they are free to leave nannydom if they wish, to find their own apartments, to go to school, to seek new jobs and to sponsor any relatives back home who might also want to come to Canada.

“They’re entitled to the same rights and privileges as any resident of Canada,” says Gale Conrad, a supervisor of immigration counselors with Canada’s Department of Immigration.

Clearly, there’s a lot in it for the foreigners, and Canada’s working mothers and fathers have been rewarded with a sizable pool of willing, legal foreigners to hire as nannies. But what’s the employer’s role?

Well, to continue the hypothetical example, suppose Baird had been a Canadian woman instead of an American. When she needed a nanny, her search would have quickly turned up an ample supply of candidates either already living legally in Canada, or eager to move here. Suppose Baird found out about Sanchez, either through a domestic-employment agency or through a Filipina friend of Sanchez’s already living in Canada. (Such immigrant women make up a lively, informal hiring network in Canada’s cities.)

Suppose that Baird decided she wanted to hire Sanchez. Because there is a formal system in place, she would find it just as easy to do the deed legally as it would be to strike some under-the-table deal with an illegal immigrant.

Baird the Canadian would next go to a government employment center and fill out a contract offering Sanchez a job for one year. The Canadian government would forward the contract to its embassy in Manila, where visa officers would set about checking on Sanchez’s health, language skills and educational qualifications. (The government substantially tightened the education requirements last year. In 1992, as a result, more British nationals came to Canada as domestics than Filipinas.)

Meanwhile, the fictitious Baird would set up her household, on paper, as a small business under Canadian law. She would notify the government that she was taking on one employee--Sanchez--and the government would assign her a taxpayer number and send instructions on how to pay taxes on Sanchez’s behalf.

The rules are similar to the regulations covering any other small business in Canada. Baird would be required to pay at least the minimum wage--about $5.10 per hour in Ontario at the current exchange rate--and to pay time-and-a-half for any overtime beyond a 44-hour week.

In addition, she would have to withhold income taxes from Sanchez’s paychecks, make payments toward Sanchez’s pension and unemployment compensation and pay the premiums for Sanchez’s Canadian health coverage.

Of course, that’s not as cheap as hiring an illegal immigrants and letting her work as much as 100 hours a week for less than the minimum wage--Dorcy says he sees this happen in the United States all the time.

But it’s not as demeaning and exploitative, either.

And, let it be said, cheating does go on in Canada, too. Some eager domestics try to beat the requirement that they live with their employers for two years, for example. The government recently caught two such women in Winnipeg and ordered them back to the Philippines.

In other cases, Canadian employers have found live-in domestics an irresistible target for abuse. Support groups here can tell horror stories about male employers molesting domestics, or about families who demand more than the 44-hour week but never get around to paying overtime. And the government concedes that in Canada, as in America, some illegal immigrants slip in and find off-the-books domestic work.

For all that, says the Immigration Department’s Conrad, “the rate of compliance (with the law) is very high, because of all the initial paperwork that has to be completed before the (domestic) can even come to Canada.”

In other words, it’s just as easy to go along with the program as to circumvent it in Canada--simply because there is a program.