Good afternoon, everyone.
I was making notes while listening to Cindy's presentation. I endorse the opinion that there's a risk in only focusing on child labour. I think this is a complex problem. It's hard to discern what's worse, child labour or forced labour generally, but that's a non sequitur.
My argument today—I've written it out for you—is really that there are some very good reasons why Canada should be legislating for a human trafficking supply chain law at the earliest opportunity. We all know that this is a horrible thing, and I'm not going to tell you horrible stories. I'll just give you a bit of legal analysis.
Other jurisdictions such as the U.K., France, and the European Union have already legislated to address this global crime, and the brave parliamentarians in those jurisdictions have chosen to address this as one of the major issues of our life and times.
Now, Canada has a choice. We can follow in the jet trail of those other countries or we can try to get into the fight a little ourselves. I'm going to try to convince you that the latter is the best choice for Canada.
Everyone's worried about burdening business with increased regulation, but that's a bit of a misconception. Canadian companies are already facing requirements in other jurisdictions to monitor their supply chains. The model that seems to be in development internationally is a website statement talking about avoidance measures; I know you've heard about this in relation to the British and French models, and I probably don't need to repeat those. That is the template that started in California, and it seems that it's being adopted across the piece.
It's incorrect to assume that the law of the United States is silent on the issue of human trafficking. The United States has several powerful laws that it may choose to call into play. In my written submissions, I talk to you about the linkage between market access and human rights, and that's something that as a committee I think you need to consider very carefully.
The laws in the other jurisdictions are already hitting thousands of Canadian companies in multiple ways, principally in two ways. The first is that if Canadian companies are directly doing business in those jurisdictions or have registered offices in those jurisdictions, as per the French law, there's a direct application of those local laws. Take the U.K. Modern Slavery Act as an example. Any Canadian company doing $10 worth of work in the United Kingdom is caught by the provisions of the Modern Slavery Act.
The second way is something Canadian businesses haven't started to be confronted with yet, and that is that every major European company, including French companies and British companies, has to do an audit of their own supply chains. Canadian companies are shortly going to face a bit of an avalanche of questionnaires if they themselves are part of the supply chain of those companies. They're going to be asked what they're doing to ensure that their supply chains are clean, as a condition of continued business and continued supply of those goods and services to foreign companies. If Australia passes a law—and Australia is obviously ahead of us—the same thing will apply with Australian companies.
Because Canadian companies haven't had to ask themselves yet whether their supply chains are clean, they're going to have a bit of a problem in complying with those requests.
Lawyers have to admit that the rise and rise of human trafficking is like Rana Plaza: a catastrophic failure of the international legal system. There are multiple laws that should have prevented Rana Plaza from happening. They did not. Human trafficking is effectively illegal everywhere, but it's growing everywhere.
The traditional legal approach of a penal law, a sanction-based law, is failing, so people who are thinking about how to address this crime are looking more at economic laws. By “economic” laws, I mean laws that, one, have the market as the policeman or -woman, and two, strive to take the profitability out of human trafficking.
A massive number of trafficked people are actually in the supply chain of the legitimate business sectors. The easiest way for the traffickers—who, by the way, are winning at the moment—to make a profit is to introduce the fruits of the labour of the trafficked people into the legitimate supply chains of global business.
The sort of laws that are being envisaged and passed by the U.K. and France are actually making this a boardroom issue and aligning companies against themselves, their employees, their consumers, and their shareholders directly or indirectly supporting this horrible crime. That's my suggestion for what Canada should do.
Supply chain transparency laws may at least start to take some of the profits out of the human trafficking industry. We don't even know how big it is. The ILO thinks it's 24 million people. I've put a quote in the notes that suggests there could be as many as 46 million people working in slavery conditions on Planet Earth in 2017.
The ILO's estimate for the global untaxed illegal profits of this crime is $150 billion U.S. per year, but that was based on their initial estimate that there were 21 million people trafficked around the world. If the later figures of 46 million are accurate, it's likely that the global illegal profits of this crime are more in the region of $400 billion U.S. a year. It's going to continue to grow because it's so profitable, so countries that want to do something about it are going to have to try to take the profits out of it with their domestic laws.
I can talk to you a bit about the history of the Modern Slavery Act and lesser-known history about how section 54 developed. All I can say on that front is that I was there, but that's a bit of a non sequitur. If you want to talk about that in the course of the questions, I'm very happy to do that.
The sort of law that we're proposing and we've seen with the MSA is quite consistent with the way that international corporate governance is developing anyway. Companies now have a greater consideration for the future, the environment, and global sustainability. The old idea that the directors were serving the immediate financial interests of the current shareholders has been consigned to the past.
In conclusion, Canadian law actually needs to get ahead of this issue. We are way late to this party. Other jurisdictions are taking a view, and that's going to catch Canadian companies. Investors in those countries have a greater insight into the risk profile of Canadian companies than Canadians do. That's nuts. We need to do something about that.
Modern slavery is the new bribery. If you think about it, 15 years ago, there were maybe two or three countries that had bribery laws, and then what happened was that if you didn't have one you were considered a corrupt jurisdiction and that became a bit of an economic issue. We're going to see a proliferation of modern slavery laws across the globe, and Canada should be one of the countries that leads in this direction rather than following in the footsteps of other jurisdictions.
Finally, we all know that there's a constitutional issue here. I've suggested in my written submission that Canada might want to look at the Human Rights Act. We've heard in the context of Cindy's presentation and others that there is a link between modern slavery and discrimination on the basis of age, nationality, race, or gender. I posit to you that we can look at this issue with a view to tweaking extant Canadian laws, and that might actually allow Canada to take a stand more quickly than we otherwise are stuck with if we're drafting from scratch.
Thank you.
