I can't overemphasize the problem in terms of what the bureaucracy was saying, that this would be based on evidence. It won't be. There is no evidence, hard evidence, of human trafficking worldwide. It's a huge problem. The Government Accountability Office of the United States has issued a slap on the hand to the CIA and to the State Department for their failure to provide statistically sound numbers. It's a huge step for the U.S. government itself to say their numbers are horribly out of whack. They have said they get 17,000 trafficking victims a year. They have found 150 a year. There is something very wrong. The Attorney General said to Congress in 2006 that the State Department's numbers may be far out of whack.
We use the State Department's numbers via their report on Canada to estimate Canada's problem. There is no hard evidence, and even in the peer-reviewed literature there is a great deal of debate about the methodologies used. There is no provision in this legislation for input from actual trafficked victims to find the evidence. There is no monitoring mechanism on the gendered effects or whether this is actually working and there is no appeal process if someone is denied.
All of these are problematic.