January 26, 2026 - There is a compliment offered with genuine warmth Filipinos in Canada hear often, “You’re so dependable.” It has been said and heard in other ways: Your’re so reliable, amazing, fantastic. To which, dutifully, we respond with gratitude because we feel valued, appreciated and duly recognized for our work ethic, and with humility because we’ve been reared within the spirit of this Christian credo.
When virtue becomes obligation
It sounds harmless, even flattering. But over time, this compliment morphs and hardens into something else—a quiet assignment, a role that rarely arrives with authority, protection, or rest. It becomes an obligation you’re expected to perform endlessly, one that feels less like recognition and more like a ceiling.
In Canadian institutions, Filipinos are everywhere: hospitals and care homes, daycare centers and nonprofits, kitchens and service counters, shop floors and manufacturing plants, business and government offices, schools and universities. We keep patients and children cared for, customers served and satisfied, facilities safe and industries flourishing, schedules intact and students supported, programs afloat and institutions productive. We steady the room. We repair the day. Our work is consistent, performance excellent, and almost never loud. Reliability becomes our reputation. Reliability becomes the way systems breathe.
When reliability becomes the limit, not the path
Quietly, our reliability as a worker, service provider, and colleague become the limit of what we’re allowed.
To be reliable is to be trusted with responsibility, but not always with the attendant power. You are summoned when something needs to be fixed quickly, sensitively, without fuss. You step in, smooth the jagged edge, stay late, translate—not just words, but tone, culture, expectation. You are thanked, sincerely. And then you are asked again.
What does not arrive with the compliment is promotion, authorship, or decision-making authority. Reliability is expected to be endless. Not a path to leadership, but a treadmill.
Essential yet unseen
Many Filipinos learn this long before professional life, before a career life. In immigrant households, children absorb an ethic of usefulness: do well, don’t cause trouble, be grateful. Especially if you are the eldest or the default breadwinner, responsibility crystallizes early. You endure so others can succeed as well. You are good because you are useful.
The love is deep, and so is the obligation. When exhaustion surfaces and you ask for rest, an old rebuke appears—ikaw pa ang masama (it’s your fault) – as if drawing a boundary for a pause erases everything you have already given. Responsibility becomes generational currency; fatigue is quietly yours to carry.
That ethic translates seamlessly at work, in the office. Filipinos are praised as team players—patient, adaptable, trusted. We don’t ask for much. We adjust to the temperature of the room. These qualities are celebrated in annual reviews and hallway gratitude, but rarely rewarded structurally. Instead, they are normalized. The dependable worker becomes part of the building’s architecture: essential yet unseen, unnoticed.
Praise genuine, math problematic, metrics faulty
In a restaurant kitchen, a Filipino cook holds down a station alone—grill, fry, plate—service after service. When he/she asks for backup, the manager smiles: You can do it. You’ve always done it. When the cook finally quits, burned out and underpaid, the role is split between two new hires. The praise was real; the math was provincial and problematic.
In healthcare and caregiving, burnout among Filipino workers is widespread and under-discussed. Emotional labour—soothing, anticipating, holding tension—rarely registers on performance metrics, yet it’s what keeps systems from collapsing.
The ache gets metabolized into humour, into small joys, into art. Social media content creator and stand-up comedian John Dela Cruz, known as @nurse. johnn, turns the stress of care work into comedy watched by millions. The laughter is relief and indictment at once: proof that the cost is real, and that it’s ours to tally.
What makes this dynamic difficult to name is that it is not overtly hostile. No one is actively excluding us; the door is open just enough to keep the system steady. Institutions run smoothly on our reliability and therefore have little incentive to change. Gratitude replaces fairness. Praise substitutes for advancement.
Reckoning?
Over time, this produces a particular fatigue—not just physical, but moral. The exhaustion of being needed without being empowered. Of being visible only when something goes wrong. Of carrying more responsibility without more support, title, or pay. Of watching others ascend into roles you have quietly performed for years. The resentment settles slowly, like sediment. Is a verbal thank-you enough? Or have we simply become the reliable engine no one thinks to maintain?
Filipino representation in Canada is improving in some ways—more faces, more names, more presence. But presence without authorship can feel hollow. You can appear on the org chart and still not be at the table where the story is written, where humanity is reckoned with.
What would it mean to interrupt this pattern?
It begins with rejecting the idea that reliability must be limitless. Saying no is not ingratitude, not betrayal, not a failure of utang na loob—the Filipino ethic of reciprocity—but an assertion of dignity. Utang na loob binds us to care; it should not bind us to self-erasure, to servility.
It continues with clarity. Communicate your goals. Managers are not mind readers; their calendars do not hold your unspoken ambitions. Saying yes to everything does not make you more reliable—it makes you less legible. Care, when unreciprocated, becomes extraction.
Let yourself be seen. Do not dim your work out of reflex. Excellence does not speak for itself unless you give it a voice. When praise comes, resist the instinctive deflection—Ay, wala ’yun—and instead name what you did, how long it took, what changed because of it. Complement gratitude with documentation. Turn documentation into leverage.
Reliability is a strength. But when a community’s strengths are continually drawn upon without redistribution of power, the result is not resilience—it is depletion. Burnout is not a personal failure; it is a systems report. That is the cost of being reliable—the ceiling of harm. To name this is not to reject care, family, or work ethic. It is an insistence that reliability must move in more than one direction—those systems benefiting from our steadiness must also make room for our leadership, our boundaries, our human quest for growth. Accountability must accompany gratitude. Protection must partner with praise.
At the threshold—between gratitude and self-erasure, between service and agency—there is a choice. We can keep holding everything together quietly, stoically, indefinitely.
Or, we can ask a different question: What would it look like if reliability were not the end of the story, but the beginning of something more just and humanely inspiring?
The compliment can stay.
The ceiling cannot.
Emmy Buccat is a Filipino Canadian writer and nonprofit professional advancing philanthropy in higher education in Canada, with a focus on equity and inclusion. In From the Thresholds, she writes reflective, analytic essays exploring Filipino culture, traditions, and community through the lens of first-generation immigrant life in Canada. The series lingers with questions and traces how our everyday lives unfold within the systems Filipino Canadians move through.
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