Evidence of meeting #88 for Justice and Human Rights in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was trafficking.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Iqra Khalid Liberal Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON
But there are different agencies that are using different definitions.
Director, Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, Statistics Canada
Yes. The application of these codes from one jurisdiction or one police force to another may vary. It could be the case in some instances, for example, that a police force may decide they would use another Criminal Code offence to lay their charge, and the prosecutor as well. That we can't say. We don't know. We can only suppose.
Liberal
Iqra Khalid Liberal Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON
How do you collect the data? Where does the data come from?
Director, Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, Statistics Canada
It's coming from two different sources, including the uniform crime reporting survey, which covers 99% of all police forces in the country. The uniform crime reporting survey collects detailed information about each criminal incident being reported to the police, and it collects information about the offenders when there is an identified offender or accused. It also collects some basic demographics information about the victims, when this is a violent offence such as human trafficking, for example.
Liberal
Iqra Khalid Liberal Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON
Do you think this mechanism of collecting data is efficient and accurate in painting a clear understanding of what human trafficking looks like?
Director, Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, Statistics Canada
Like I mentioned at the outset of the presentation, we have reasons to believe that there could be under-reporting when we look only at police reported statistics. However, these police reported statistics represent a very accurate picture of what comes into the criminal justice system, and we need to keep track of that.
Liberal
Iqra Khalid Liberal Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON
Continuing with data collection is there a breakdown of ethnicities or minority groups in the data that is collected from people?
Kathy AuCoin Chief, Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, Statistics Canada
That's a wonderful question. From our datasets we have no idea of the ethnicity of either the victim or the accused. That data is not captured by police services. That being said, at Statistics Canada we're exploiting different means of mining our data through data linkages. One concept we're thinking about because this is a gap is conceptually how to link our datasets to other datasets that have indicators of ethnicity. This will be helpful for those victims who are domestic, but in instances where someone's coming from another country, there might be some challenges.
Liberal
Iqra Khalid Liberal Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON
I had a very good conversation with a local organization that is working on human trafficking within my community of Peel Region. This lady who has been working with victims of trafficking for the past decade now mentioned that the majority of victims she sees are white, middle-class people, although Peel Region is one that is a very diverse community.
Other than the one you just outlined, in what ways do you think more collaboration among these grassroots organizations could help in collecting that efficient data?
Chief, Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, Statistics Canada
We need to think creatively. The other other reality we always have to remember is that these are victims. They're traumatized. From a victim-centric perspective, whether they would turn to authorities, whether they would divulge to an NGO what type of victim they are.... Often with victims there's a pause period. They escape a situation, and it takes months or years before they turn to an authority. Perhaps moving forward, we could have a lagged data collection, but I think our efforts are limited by the ability of victims and the trauma they experience.
We work with NGOs. We work with victims services. As Yvan mentioned, with every new survey that we start developing with victims services, we often ask about human trafficking to try to find a way to increase our understanding by adding data to those vehicles.
February 27th, 2018 / 12:20 p.m.
Liberal
Liberal
Michel Picard Liberal Montarville, QC
I'm going to ask my questions in French for those who need translation.
Mr. Clermont, you talked about statistics, but there is much discussion about our own situation. To develop a more effective strategy, I think we should put our figures into perspective. By comparison with other countries, how can we describe Canada as a market for human trafficking? Is Canada a market of suppliers or consumers? That assessment would help us to adopt a more consistent strategy.
Director, Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, Statistics Canada
That is an excellent suggestion. That said, it is quite difficult to make international comparisons with regard to human trafficking, in particular because definitions can differ among jurisdictions. We have not conducted a specific study to see how countries compare with respect to human trafficking. It is something we could look into, however.
Since the statistics reported to us by police are not detailed enough, it is quite difficult to determine whether Canada is a market for suppliers or consumers, to use your terminology. As you mentioned, there are gaps in the statistics. We are not able to gather that data for the time being.
Liberal
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Anthony Housefather
No, but you can say something later on when we go around the table.
Mr. MacGregor, you have the floor.
NDP
Alistair MacGregor NDP Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC
Thank you, Chair, and it's good to be back at this committee.
NDP
Alistair MacGregor NDP Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC
Mr. Clermont, I want to continue along the lines of your conversation with Mr. Nicholson about charges that are stayed and dropped. I believe about 60% or so are. You touched on it a little, but does the Department of Justice collect data on the reasons for charges being stayed or withdrawn? It seems to me that if this committee is to make a recommendation on how well our justice system functions, we need to know if that kind of data is retained, so that we can understand whether the Criminal Code is working as it should or whether some prosecution strategies are more successful than others and so on.
Director, Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, Statistics Canada
This is a very good question. The reasons a prosecutor would withdraw a charge are those I mentioned. They either saw that the probability of conviction was very low, or they lacked information to go on and pursue the case. It could even be that it's not in the public interest. For example, these are documented reasons why a case could be withdrawn.
In this particular case, and in other cases that are going through the criminal courts in each province, we don't have the information specifically as to why the case was withdrawn. The only thing we could do, as Mr. Nicholson suggested, is to try and see if these cases are coming back in the system under another type of charge, for example. It remains something we could look at, and certainly it's an avenue we could explore.
NDP
Alistair MacGregor NDP Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC
In terms of some of the gaps that exist in data collection, we want to make a recommendation to the government, but you also know from your best practices.... Is there a particular department in the federal government, such as Statistics Canada, that could maybe take on a broader role? Do you have any suggestions in that regard, about maybe increasing your mandate in this particular area? Are there any recommendations that you could pass on to us in that regard?
Director, Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, Statistics Canada
Making a recommendation as such to increase the scope, for example, of the integrated criminal court survey could be made through Statistics Canada, because we have interactions with all departments of justice in the country, and we have a committee of liaison officers reporting to the deputy minister responsible for the administration of justice and public safety. This is how we function, and we govern the justice statistics area.
If a suggestion or a recommendation is made in that regard, then it can be put towards Statistics Canada, which would connect with the appropriate departments.
NDP
Alistair MacGregor NDP Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC
Thank you.
Mr. Massé, I want to talk to you about trafficking specifically with regard to labour. In the cases that have been prosecuted, is there a trend towards the employer being complicit, or did they unknowingly hire people through a third party? Generally, how is the system working for those who were convicted of the crime? Where are some of the areas we need to address? Is it the complicity of specific bad employers, or is there a third party involved in providing a worker pool to these employers, and they just unwittingly hire them?
Director General, Temporary Foreign Worker Directorate, Skills and Employment Branch, Department of Employment and Social Development
In terms of specific cases, they're not something that is part of our mandate. We look at the employers. I don't have any specific information around the outcome of specific cases and how those were dealt with through the justice system.
We know that part of the vulnerabilities are around the use of third parties. You mentioned that in your question, and there really are two aspects to that system, one that third parties based domestically use, and one for those who are being hired who are based in foreign countries. For those who are here, those are subject principally to provincial and territorial legislation around the regulation of recruiting activities, and in many provinces, there are specific rules and laws that govern the use of foreign recruiters.
In our TFW program, we ensure that the employers who apply respect the provincial laws with respect to recruiters. We also have a regulation that prohibits any fees being charged to workers by third parties, so those are rules we apply.
With regard to the foreign recruiters, that's something that's a bit more challenging because we're not directly responsible for that, but there are a couple of areas that we are exploring. The first is work that we're doing with the International Organization for Migration. This is an international organization that's very active in the area of the migration of workers, and they are developing what's called IRIS, an international registration and information system for foreign recruiters. The idea is to establish an international standard and code of practice that would allow foreign recruiters to be registered and to follow that standard. We're working with them and supporting the development of that, and it's expected that it will be piloted in a couple of provinces this year, in Saskatchewan and Alberta, where any employer wanting to use a foreign recruiter would need to use one who's registered with IRIS. That's something we're going to be monitoring to see how we can maybe incorporate that into the broader TFW program.
We're also thinking about strengthening our regulations and trying to identify ways that maybe we can strengthen our own regulatory authorities to deal with this, but that's all under development, and there's nothing specific at this point.
Liberal
Ron McKinnon Liberal Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC
Thank you, Chair.
I think I have one question, and then I will share my time with my colleagues.
Ms. Kim and Mr. Massé, you spoke a lot about things that could be done to ensure compliance, to detect breaches, and so forth, but these all seem to depend on the employer or the worker somehow intersecting with the system in some way. I'm wondering if there is a mechanism or if there are any kind of tools available to detect situations that are purely clandestine, people who have come in the country, and we don't know about them, or employers who are trafficking or making people work who haven't gone through the LMIA process or anything like that. Is there any mechanism or any investigative approach used to be able to detect these cases and find them?