The war of statistics is always a bit of a strange war. Our women contacts in New Zealand paint a very different picture.
We were talking about indigenous women earlier. In New Zealand, Maori women have even founded an organization to fight the choice their society made. These women say that prostitution has become more normalized in New Zealand society as a whole, including their community, and more and more young Maori girls are being brought into prostitution.
New Zealand is the only country in the world that has opted for full decriminalization. As I said earlier, the problem is that totally decriminalizing prostitution makes the harms and consequences of prostitution on women in general, and particularly indigenous and racialized women, completely invisible. Based on the data I have, international human trafficking has increased because more men in New Zealand want to buy sex and the country has seen a rise in sex tourism.
Montreal is already recognized as a hub when it comes to human trafficking for sexual exploitation, among other things. We can all imagine what it would become if Canada chose to fully decriminalize prostitution.
We urge you, I urge you, to stop looking at prostitution from the perspective of needing to improve the conditions for engaging in prostitution. You need to look at why prostitution exists, at the impact of prostitution on safety, dignity and equality for all women.
You currently have an enormous responsibility. You hold in your hands the opportunity to decide that the way we look at prostitution in Canada will be tied into equality for all women. What you've heard so far, especially the very powerful lobby that wants to succeed in totally decriminalizing prostitution in Canada, are the stories of those who are willing to talk about it. However, that means the majority of other women and girls who are brought into prostitution, primarily due to poverty, as Ms. Heinz said, are not being heard.
We have just emerged from a pandemic and we're not quite out of it yet. More Canadian women are living in poverty today than in 2020. Do we know to what extent poverty will push women into prostitution?
Clearly, we have a global industry that feeds on that poverty as well as social and economic inequalities, and they are just awaiting a decision like this. Some of you will unfortunately defend the idea that we need to do away with these laws because they stop people from purchasing sexual services. We stick our heads in the sand and believe we have no role to play in dismantling this patriarchal practice.