Thank you. Thank you for having me here today. It's an honour to be present.
My name is Glendene Grant. I'm a wife, a mother, a grandmother, and the founder of MATH, Mothers Against Trafficking Humans. I'm not here today with any studies or data. I have a real story.
I started MATH on April 18, 2010, as part of my way to raise awareness of human trafficking and educate anyone I can about the crime of human trafficking, after my daughter Jessie Foster went missing.
She was quickly known to be a victim of the crime. She is an international endangered missing woman and pretty much the most well-known human trafficking victim in Canada. Some of us even refer to her as the poster child for the crime. So my reason for being here is personal. I want to tell you a little bit about what happened to Jessie.
When she was 17 she met a man in Calgary who became her friend. They stayed friends even after she graduated high school, got a job, and her own apartment. To me this person was grooming her. That's my opinion. He is a recruiter and a pimp. His brother is a known pimp. We didn't know that right away, but when we found out it fell into place. She was taken on two “trips”. I always do quotes around “trips” because they weren't what you would want to go on.
They took her to Florida. They took her to Manhattan and Atlantic City, and instead of bringing her home on the second trip, they took her to Las Vegas. This happened after it was suggested to her that she prostitute herself the night before they were to leave, because their funds had run out and he didn't have any money for expenses to get them home .
So she rushed downstairs and called me, and was a little bit upset at the time, but said he's just being a jerk and I'm going back up to my room.
The next morning she called and said they were going to Las Vegas. She said nothing about what had happened the night before. She acted like it didn't happen. I was scared. I didn't know what was going on. I just knew that it wasn't a normal situation.
When she got to Las Vegas she called and said she was going to stay there until her 21st birthday, which was two weeks away. Twenty-one is the legal age in Las Vegas so it also fell into place once she went missing.
It didn't take her long to change her story. After the birthday story there was an accident. Then she had to stay for insurance. Then after that she met a fellow. After that she fell in love, moved in, and got engaged. This all happened very quickly. She was actually living with this fellow by June. She only got there in May.
After she went missing we hired a private investigator. She had been beaten, hospitalized with a broken jaw, forced to work in an escort agency, and arrested for solicitation.
When I talk about Jessie I talk about my honour roll student. She was into sports, music, dance, had tonnes of friends since kindergarten, and had never been in trouble ever in her life, not with school, friends, parents, or anything.
The first time she was arrested was in June. She had only been taken there in May. She was arrested again in September. She went missing in March. It was 10 months after she was taken down there. When we hired a private investigator, everything came out immediately.
Her pimp, or I should say her fiancé, had a bail bonds company he worked with all the time. This bail bonds company bailed Jessie out twice plus all of his other girls who worked for him. I know this because I actually talked to the bounty hunter who worked for him. This guy called me up and wanted to find Jessie. She was due for court and had a bail. I told him, you find her, because she's missing and I'd be glad for her to go to jail. I don't care what....
He was very touched by her story, and once that case ended and he had no contract, he came on pro bono to help us look for Jessie. He couldn't find her either.
Now with Jessie, she's my second oldest of four daughters. She has a stepdad, my husband, Jim, and me. We've been together almost 30 years, but yesterday was our first wedding anniversary. We just got married. I felt horrible doing it without Jessie, but we've done a lot of things without Jessie in the last eight years. Two of her sisters have become moms. Life has gone on. As best as we can, we've coped with it.
Two of her sisters were still teenagers when she went missing. Her older sister was 23 so they were just entering their adulthood. The problem with all that is that they've had to do all this with a missing sister, and to do all that you have to really learn to cope. They kind of took their key from me. I said whatever we're going to do we're going to do for Jessie, and we're going to do it with Jessie in our hearts.
Some of us have coped. Some of us haven't. Her father has not. He is no longer working. His health has deteriorated. He's greatly overweight, and it's sad to say because he's a wonderful man but this has destroyed him from the inside out. It's his daughter and he can't cope with it.
I'm very grateful that I have a supportive husband. He has a very supportive wife, too, but sometimes that's not enough. Jim's there with me all the way.
Now this is why I believe in Bill C-36. The biggest reason is that we can't have the alternative. We can't have prostitution, and everything else connected to it, as a legal occupation in Canada. We need to keep laws in place to stop it. There are no safe ways for there to be legal brothels and street walkers with bodyguards, or pimps, as I call them. We know they're pimps. We need to let them know this is not going to be tolerated in Canada again. We can't risk more and more people being forced into the sex trade, if this was to be a legal job, as there would never be enough people to fill the potential job openings.
We truly cannot have any more victims like Jessie or any more families like ours. I've been living this nightmare for eight years. Even eight days or eight hours is a really hard time. When Jessie first went missing, we all thought it was going to be over the next day, at the end of the week. The first year comes along; it's just ongoing. Some people who are advocates, we can't live without them, but thank goodness they can take a day off or go on a holiday and get a little reprieve from this. I can't. I wake up every day...goes to Jessie, goes to what probably happened to her, and then it goes to my fight to stop this from happening.
Another important fact, in my opinion, is that we need to stop this demand, because that's the only thing that's keeping it going. If we don't hold the pimps and the johns accountable, it'll never happen. There are people who want to pay for sex and there are people who are victimized into servicing them by some very cruel people.
We need lots of funding for people to exit the sex trade. It's something that's needed; otherwise, nothing else will work. There are many people who have told me that they're in the sex trade because they have no way out. They don't want to stay in it, but they can't afford to support their children and get some kind of an education. None of them are receiving any counselling for the trauma that they've endured. They've been told, literally, it's a catch-22. They want to leave. When they try, they fail and they end up back. That to me is absolutely horrible. The men, women, and children need to get a way to get their lives back. They need to learn how to live happy, healthy lives, and those with children need to do it for their kids, too. It takes time and money. It's not easy. They want to live a life that they're proud of.
I just spoke to a woman the other day. She messaged me on Facebook and asked me why I support this bill. She does not, but she believes everyone has an opinion. We conversed for quite some time. She told me, “I will never tell my daughters what I do for a living.” To me that just told me right there and then that's not her choice of a job, of a career. If you want your children to make the right choices in their lives, they have to be told the truth. They have to know what's going on in their own lives and families. Otherwise, you know, they're just falling. They need to know what their mother does for a living, and they need to be proud of everything.
As far as MATH is concerned, MATH has really helped me. I speak all over, at different types of events. Some I do just on my own with MATH. If it's in the Kamloops and District Crime Stoppers area, I go with Mark Price. He's the head of that organization there. We just go to schools. We go to anything we can. We've been to a school in Boston Bar, B.C.—it's such a small place, kindergarten through 12 is one school—because of a missing young lady. She was missing for two weeks, and she came back. Everyone thought, “Thank goodness, she's back. She's fine.” Then they started realizing she wasn't fine, so they brought us into their school so we could explain to their students what's out there.
With me it's become a personal crusade. It's my coping mechanism. It's also my way to keep Jessie out there. I have no proof that Jessie's not alive or that she's dead, so I go on the assumption that she is alive. Hopefully, we'll find her one day. When we do find her, she's going to see that there have been fights in her name and changes brought about.
I'm not just going to sit there. When Jessie went missing there was a fine line between a missing person and a human trafficking victim. Everyone thought I was grasping at a straw, I needed an excuse, something to explain what happened to my daughter and where she went. Now we are eight-plus years, eight-and-a-half years later, and we have laws that are changing. Every day we're hearing about organizations being arrested and people being charged with this crime. When Jessie went missing, it wasn't even a known crime. People told me it doesn't happen in North America, it doesn't happen in Canada. We now know it does.
So we need to make a change, and I want to thank you for allowing me to speak on Jessie's behalf.