Status of Women committee  You share my pain.

Status of Women committee  Yes.

Status of Women committee  The judge will more than likely reserve judgment in order to give a written decision because of the complexities of the case. The actual decision will probably be made sometime in April or May. And remember that Mr. Ng hasn't spent any time behind bars. Mr. Ng was released back into the community, and he has very strict restrictions.

Status of Women committee  The creation of section 279 of the Criminal Code of Canada, on domestic human trafficking, and all of the subsections that flow from it are an excellent start. There's even the ability within that section now to return to the victim some monetary goods or moneys for their victimization.

Status of Women committee  I suppose the barriers are the victims themselves. Those are the biggest barriers. Detective Constable Holm spoke to it, and so did my friends from Toronto. You have to establish that trust and get the reputation of your vice unit out there to the NGOs and the other people who offer services for the exit of women from the sex trade.

Status of Women committee  An appropriate sentence for Mr. Ng would be life imprisonment, and that all property he owns in Canada be turned over to the government.

Status of Women committee  If Mr. Ng, after all the publicity we've had around this file, is sentenced to some minimal amount of time or some small fine that he can recoup in his continuing operation in a month or a year, or whatever, he'll just go back into business again. His business has never shut down, if you can believe it.

Status of Women committee  Stronger laws. And I'll pass it over to my friends from Toronto, because they made a comment about the law. In the United States, for this individual who crossed the border in possession of child pornography, he is going to get upwards of between 10 and 15 years in prison in Washington state.

Status of Women committee  As far as trafficking is concerned, my friend Mr. Grant from CIC commented about life imprisonment and a $1 million fine for human trafficking convictions. Our case is before the courts now, our provincial courts in British Columbia at 222 Main Street, and we'll see what the sentence is from that building, but traditionally that is a very liberal house of justice.

Status of Women committee  That's a very global sort of question. From the perspective of a pimp, an operator of a bawdy house, or organized crime, they wouldn't care what happened to them. Who cares? They're no longer of monetary value, so they discard them like garbage. Of course those poor people are then the ones who are survival sex trade workers, quite often on the streets, or they commit suicide, or they have a drug overdose of some kind—something along that line.

Status of Women committee  Yes. I used the term “sex destination city”; that's what the people who come to Vancouver to get involved in sex refer to it as. There are people across the border who come to Vancouver for that purpose. As far as the members of our unit being aware of the sex trade is concerned, they're all very aware of what goes on in and around the street sex scene, and massage parlours and things of that nature.

Status of Women committee  That is a little bit newer investigative technique for us. We do have also the same two investigators who are involved in Internet luring files, and we've participated in files where, by Internet, someone from the United States has communicated with someone, a young girl in Canada, and then arranged to have a meeting, and we were set up waiting for that meeting to make the arrest or to participate with authorities in the United States to apprehend because we are so close to the border.

Status of Women committee  It's tremendously important from our perspective. We finally located one NGO in the Lower Mainland to deal with the two victims that we have in a case that's before the courts now. They were a godsend. Without their assistance, we wouldn't have known what to do. There were times in the course of the file when we wondered where we were going to send the people, outside of considering someone taking them home.

Status of Women committee  So it was the repetitious assaults that led to a very serious assault on a particular day, which finally was the straw that broke the camel's back. These women were in an advanced state of trauma when they finally did contact 911. We wrapped our unit around it, and it occupied us exclusively for probably six months.

Status of Women committee  If you think the Canadian public is unaware of the phenomenon of human trafficking, wait until the small police department on the Prairies or in Quebec gets the human trafficking victim who phones 911. Then all hell's going to break loose at about 2 a.m. They're going to have nowhere to put that victim.