Evidence of meeting #89 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 trafficked.
A recording is available from Parliament.
4:20 p.m.
Conservative
Rob Nicholson Conservative Niagara Falls, ON
Did that get into the local newspapers, or were papers very careful about not identifying the—
4:20 p.m.
As an Individual
When I was in Calgary, and this was over 20 years ago, there were just as many men being trafficked as girls. In Montreal, it's the same thing. When you get the race cars out there, the Indy races, whenever there are towns with great events.... Regina was a convention town, so there became a very great demand for human trafficking, but Calgary especially, because of the stampede and then the oil at that time. There was a lot of money there, so all the traffickers would go to that area.
4:20 p.m.
Conservative
Rob Nicholson Conservative Niagara Falls, ON
The hotel owners would be aware of this? They'd understand that this was taking place within their confines?
4:20 p.m.
Conservative
Rob Nicholson Conservative Niagara Falls, ON
Oh, I see, okay.
Do you think, Joy, that more could be done, you know what I mean, in terms of identifying where these crimes take place, or is everybody careful about not...?
4:20 p.m.
Founder and President, Joy Smith Foundation Inc.
There are definitely things that can be done.
I had a case in Toronto where a 12-year-old was held in a room for a whole week. Suspicions were all around that particular room because men kept going into it. I asked the cleaning lady whether there was something going on there, and she said she didn't want to have anything to do with it. Something was going on.
Eventually that particular girl jumped out of a window. She wasn't really hurt and we got her to safety, but she wouldn't speak against her perpetrators. She did tell me that there were many kids taken to that hotel.
I think there has to be definitive direction to hoteliers about.... They should be advertising their hotels as clean hotels.
4:20 p.m.
Conservative
Rob Nicholson Conservative Niagara Falls, ON
Is that hotel still in the business of assisting in the trafficking of young girls?
4:20 p.m.
Conservative
4:20 p.m.
Founder and President, Joy Smith Foundation Inc.
You need [Inaudible] the consequences.
4:20 p.m.
Liberal
4:20 p.m.
Liberal
Iqra Khalid Liberal Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON
Thank you, Chair.
Firstly, thank you to all the witnesses for your very compelling testimony.
To continue the line of questioning of Mr. Nicholson, something that is becoming more and more prevalent now, as I was reading a news article, is the use of Airbnbs as a place to traffic young women and boys. That makes it even more difficult to track and to find where these acts are happening.
Mr. Bouchard, you spoke about the hotels kind of being in it together with the perpetrators and then the traffickers themselves. How does it work? Is it kind of like a small business, in which you, an individual, get a few young women or boys to traffic, or is there a network or more of an organized crime type of community in this specific industry?
4:20 p.m.
As an Individual
Years ago it was dedicated to organized crime. I know because my father-in-law was a hit man for the mafia. In that day it was more in organized crime. Today I find it's just any guy who decides to make money. He hears from someone else that it's so easy to traffic, so you'll get one guy getting one or two girls. They have these strolls of hotels, especially in Montreal, I find. There's a specific street there, Saint-Jacques, where cheap motels at the time were $25 to $50. The girls rent that room for the night. The hotel clerk knows all about it, but he's getting 75% to 80% of his business from this trafficking, so he will never, ever report it. Of course, he'd be afraid to.
When I was in Regina, I got kicked out of every hotel. It wasn't because they reported me, because they were so afraid; it was because the “moralities” that were taking care of this human trafficking at the time would visit the hotels and go through the book in the lobby and they would track down the names, and then they would ask, “Where do you think this guy is? This is the guy we're looking for.” So they would take the key from the clerk and come and open our doors and bust us, right? But, again, they couldn't arrest us. They would just move us from one hotel to the other. So eventually what happened is, in Regina, I had absolutely nowhere to go, and I thought that was a great way to get rid of predators. But then they'd just move on to another place, where it becomes easy, like big cities. It's very, very hard to control because the income from these hotels comes primarily from human trafficking; that's how big the demand is. In the Monarch Towers, for example, almost every room was used for that.
4:25 p.m.
Liberal
Iqra Khalid Liberal Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON
Wow.
Ms. Smith, I firstly want to thank you for spending a lifetime on this very important issue.
Now I'll ask you this, and also Ms. Redsky. In terms of the victims you deal with, is there any kind of central body that you report data to, in terms of how many victims you are helping to serve, what kind of measures are being taken, the age or the gender of these victims, etc.? Is there a central data collection that even organizations working in collaboration perhaps are working to build?
4:25 p.m.
Founder and President, Joy Smith Foundation Inc.
No. I've worked over 2,332 files. I have them in my foundation. However, that's over many years, and anything that I know about I report immediately to the police authorities in the province where it occurs. The fact of the matter is that we need to have formal data-gathering of these cases, and we need to have partnerships between police forces and NGOs.
Right now what's happening is that a lot of not-for-profit charities deal with trafficking victims, and a lot of the trafficking victims don't like them to call the police. It makes it very difficult for the police. I think the laws coming in have helped victims speak out, the very brave ones. It's like parents. It's very hard to get a parent to speak out after their child has been trafficked, because they're embarrassed about it. I don't know why. It's not their fault; it's the predator's fault.
I think we have to be very forward-thinking in getting this data gathered. When Diane was on the Women's Foundation, they did a marvellous job of gathering data about the number of victims of human trafficking. Their number was thousands ahead of the RCMP number, and my own son is RCMP. I'm very pro-police—I'm the most pro-police person—but they're usually about four years behind because they're so busy fighting multiple crimes, including huge drug and human-trafficking crimes, that I really think it takes government and parliamentarians to help put in a data collection mechanism.
People say they're going to. In the budget I just heard about a national phone line that could be called in to, but you need more than that. You need data gathering that's on the minute, right now.
Before I came to Parliament, I had a master's degree in education in mathematics and science. When we studied statistics, we learned that there are different ways of taking statistics. When I came to Parliament, I would see one group gathering statistics this way, and NGOs gathering statistics in another way. Someone should wake up to the fact that when non-governmental organizations are finding that they're dealing with thousands of human traffickers, and then we see what police forces have, and they're going by just the actual convictions they get. They're doing better and better in their statistics now, but they need to be current, because what happened two years ago is much different from what is happening now.
When I first came to Parliament, nobody knew about human trafficking. Don't blame them, because there was nothing on paper. In Parliament, if you put a bill down, you have to prove everything you do, and it's really difficult. You know something is going on, but you have to prove it, so you have to get multiple victims to talk, and that data gathering to this day is not very accurate.
I strongly recommend that this needs to be looked at, but it's not from just one source. It has to be from non-governmental organizations, from the aboriginal community, from police forces, from border patrols, from all these different organizations. We need to work together. Our tag line for the foundation is “working together to end human trafficking”, and I don't see that togetherness coming out in a real-world way so that the end product is such that you know exactly what's going on.
I hope that has answered your question.
4:30 p.m.
NDP
Murray Rankin NDP Victoria, BC
Thank you.
I'd like to say to all of the witnesses just how moving and important your presentations were.
I'd like to start, if I could, with Ms. Redsky. I'm focused on the disproportionate number of indigenous girls and women who are involved, and I'm wondering if there are certain systemic failures that make indigenous girls more susceptible to human trafficking, whether it's foster care, police attitudes, racism, or simply poverty. Have you given thought to that? What would you suggest we do about it?
4:30 p.m.
Executive Director, Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata Centre Inc.
Well, actually as an indigenous woman myself, we live it every day, in fact. The systems continue to perpetuate creating vulnerability for indigenous women and girls, and we have countless examples just in this year alone, of how systems have failed us and continue to fail us.
The Native Women's Association of Canada did a report, with which I agree, and concluded that we're over-policed and under-protected. There are a number of factors that play into that, and colonization is the biggest culprit that created poverty, that created the racism. And there is a market for indigenous women and girls. We actually created and allowed Canada to create disposable women, and those disposable women—who cares what happens to them—are indigenous women.
Both traffickers and the men, because they're separate.... In the supply and the demand there are the traffickers and then you have the consumers and they're oftentimes separate. They are targeting indigenous women and girls because it's easier, for one. And it's easier because women and girls continue to be vulnerable to being recruited and lured, plus they can make more money because indigenous women and girls are experiencing way more violence, being trafficking victims, in comparison to non-indigenous victims. Again, it's because they can be.
In the late 1990s we had an aboriginal justice inquiry on the death of Helen Betty Osborne and that concluded that, as a society, we have marginalized indigenous women so much that these men who killed Helen Betty Osborne saw women as promiscuous and really of no human value. You can do what you want, and you can get away with it. That is the sad reality of indigenous women in Canada today.
4:30 p.m.
NDP
Murray Rankin NDP Victoria, BC
Building on that very compelling answer, how can we begin to address the abuse at the hands of men that seems to be essentially socially sanctioned, if I can call it that? How do we make society understand that it's absolutely unacceptable for men to buy girls?
For example, we talked about the importance of Bill C-36. Maybe we have to provide better name and shame type of arrangements so the perpetrators are publicized. That is one way.
In general, have you given thought to how we might make it more socially unacceptable for this to occur?
4:30 p.m.
Executive Director, Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata Centre Inc.
I think we're on a good path in looking at gender equality and that whole conversation in Canada, but the answers are within the indigenous communities themselves, and the leadership is there. Given the right kind of opportunity, the right kind of proper resource development, those voices can be heard and can start shifting the consciousness of Canadians. The role and the gift and the capacity and the proper leadership of indigenous women is.... We can do that, but it must be led by the indigenous communities in partnership. We have to get rid of the inequality of indigenous women.
In fact, we can even lock this in and get into the conversation about the Indian Act. The Indian Act is there because we're considered less than human. We need extra laws—not just the laws everybody else has, but more rules than everybody else, because we're considered less than human. Not until we as a society start looking at working together and using the resources and the leadership that already exist in the indigenous community can we start shifting the conversation.
I don't like overusing “reconciliation”, but that's a really important part, and it does require equality.
4:35 p.m.
NDP
Murray Rankin NDP Victoria, BC
I have so many questions and I know I have so little time.
Have I got time for another one?
4:35 p.m.
NDP
Murray Rankin NDP Victoria, BC
You said specifically, if I can remember your exact words, that we need to give women and girls the incentives to come forward. How?
