Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and distinguished members of this committee.
I want to recognize and acknowledge that our offices are located on treaty territory, the original lands of the Anishinabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.
I am a former member of Parliament. I worked hard during my time as an MP to bring the human trafficking issue to the public radar screen here in Canada. The Joy Smith Foundation was founded in 2011 to combat human trafficking. Since then, I volunteer every single day at my foundation to continue the work to bring awareness about human trafficking in Canada and to help survivors and their families restore their lives.
Last October, we launched the National Human Trafficking Education Centre, the first of its kind in Canada. The centre provides free education for parents, teachers, law enforcement, service providers and others. We have 64 instructor-led modules that are currently being put online so that Canadians can receive much-needed information about how traffickers operate and what they can do to protect themselves from these predators.
We have worked on over 6,000 files of victims and their families, to restore their lives and help the victims reintegrate into the communities and back into their families. Our prevention and intervention programs at the NHTEC will be online for easy access for Canadians as soon as we get the translations completed in French and English and into some indigenous languages.
A five-minute presentation at committee today does not give justice to the complex issue of trafficking in persons and how important Bill C-36 is to the safety of our youth. It was the catalyst that set the groundwork for so many victims of human trafficking to be able to speak out and bring their perpetrators to justice. It helped me, when I was a member of Parliament, to bring the survivors' voice to the public radar screen.
When I was in Parliament, I had two bills passed to combat human trafficking: Bill C-268 and Bill C-310. They are embedded in the Criminal Code of Canada today. I had widespread support from all sides of the House at the time I was passing these bills, and I give credit to the survivors for telling their stories.
Members from all sides of the House supported these bills, and that was critical, because it opened a nationwide conversation about human trafficking and how its victims were suffering. More than that, Canadians, including the survivors themselves, started their own organizations to combat human trafficking.
Bill C-36 must remain, and parliamentarians must do more to protect their constituents from these predators, because the traffickers are in every constituency in our country. Victims of human trafficking are the recipients of horrid abuse and often lose their lives. To legalize prostitution would be a travesty of massive proportions against our most vulnerable populations, our LGBTQ, our immigrants and our youth.
I see it over and over again every single day: the suffering of young victims of human trafficking and what they endure at the hands of human traffickers, traffickers who seek to make copious amounts of money off their victims, as much as $260,000 to $280,000 per victim per year. That is why they do it. Most of the victims enter the sex trade at a very young age, as young as 12 to 14 years, and some even younger.
Before Bill C-36 came on the scene, there was nothing that effectively reduced the demand for the exploitation of underage girls and boys from traffickers, and in criminalizing the johns who create the demand for sexual services, Bill C-36 has helped curtail the human trafficking.
Human traffickers are the third parties who promote and capitalize on the demand for sex by facilitating this practice. They initially pose as benevolent helpers, providers or protectors to those innocent victims, who are lured into the modern-day slave trade. Bill C-36 addresses this issue as one of the objectives that has helped greatly in bringing these perpetrators to justice: It recognized trafficked victims as individuals who are lured and live through the horrid human trafficking experience with horrendous physical and mental traumas on their shoulders.
For the first time in Canadian criminal law, the purchase of sexual services is illegal. This helps in bringing traffickers to justice, because this offence makes prostitution itself an illegal practice, but this is a balanced law, because these adults who choose to sell themselves for sex are protected by law and can do so with no ramifications.
Recently, in Winnipeg, we were able to lobby to shut down the licensing of massage parlours and strip clubs. This is where human traffickers often place their victims.
Thank you so very much for this time today, because I have to say loud and clear, Bill C-36 is very helpful and very successful in doing these kinds of things.
In conclusion, parliamentarians must strive to keep Bill C-36 and do so much more to ensure trafficking in persons is no longer a factor in Canada.
Meegwetch.