Evidence of meeting #17 for Status of Women in the 39th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was work.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Full Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Ottawa
In Canada, it is prohibited to sell or buy blood, and the same applies to organs, even if the person consents. However, that does not seem to be the case for female sexual organs.
Associate Professor, Department of History and Politics, University of New Brunswick
I'll address two questions with respect to minors.
The numbers are very soft. The methodologies are problematic because of the differences in definitions. If you define all prostitutes as traffic, then the numbers are huge. If you're referring only to those who are forced or tricked, then the numbers get smaller.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Judy Sgro
I have to move on to our next questioner. Maybe in your reply to Ms. Smith you could get in the point you are trying to make.
Conservative
Joy Smith Conservative Kildonan—St. Paul, MB
I find this extremely interesting. I worked for ten years on this human trafficking issue, and I have a son in the RCMP, in the ICE Unit. It's the same struggle we see here in committee. It was so difficult to get human trafficking considered as a topic.
It is a growing industry. Professor Poulin, your presentation was one of the best I've heard, and I've been all over the world, on three continents. It was good and very honest. Even your criticisms of what needs to be done are very much appreciated. We're talking about a struggle in the human philosophy of right or wrong.
I would like to have a comment from you. First, do you believe that the sex industry is an industry, or that it should be looked on as an industry? Second, what are your views on legalizing prostitution? Our present government would never do this. It's not something we consider healthy for Canadians or the community. Yet we've heard something on this from another witness. I'm as baffled as my colleague Ms. Mourani. This is foreign to me in light of my experience on the ground, working in shelters.
I would like to have comments from both of you on this. Professor Poulin, you could answer first and then Ms. Jeffrey.
Associate Professor, Department of History and Politics, University of New Brunswick
I'll just pick up where I left off. I think my answer addresses the same question. I know this is difficult to understand, because people have a moral reaction to prostitution. But remember, we're talking about trafficking with respect to all sorts of workers—agricultural, domestic work, and so on. That does not mean they want to be exploited. Part of what the trafficking discussion is identifying is the exploitation of workers. It is only when we talk about prostitution that the solution is to stop the work, to rescue the workers and send them home.
If we were talking about domestic workers who were trafficked, who wanted to come to Canada and couldn't get a legal visa—
Conservative
Joy Smith Conservative Kildonan—St. Paul, MB
Can I clarify my question? I think this is something different from what I asked.
In human trafficking, we're talking about the sexual exploitation of children and women. We're talking about a woman's right to respect and equal opportunity in the workforce. I want to look at it from a point of view of sexual exploitation. We're not talking about factory workers. We're talking about sexual exploitation.
Associate Professor, Department of History and Politics, University of New Brunswick
But you must remember Canada's—
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Judy Sgro
Just one moment, Ms. Jeffrey. Maybe this is something that the committee needs to clarify.
When we went into this, we talked about the bigger picture of human trafficking. It is more than sexual exploitation. I don't believe we have to deal with that specifically. I don't believe we were narrowing it down. If that's what the committee wants to do, fine. But we went into this talking about human trafficking in the larger sense.
Maybe we'll have to talk about this after.
Conservative
Joy Smith Conservative Kildonan—St. Paul, MB
No, Madam Chair, I'm questioning the witness, and my question is about sexual exploitation.
Liberal
Conservative
Joy Smith Conservative Kildonan—St. Paul, MB
Could you answer my question for me, please, Professor?
Associate Professor, Department of History and Politics, University of New Brunswick
I will point out that Canada is party to the transnational organized crime protocol on trafficking, which defines trafficking not just as sexual servitude. It also includes work of other sorts, and organ transplants as well. So trafficking officially, internationally, by the Canadian government's own definition, is much wider than sexual servitude. Nonetheless, I'll answer your question about choice.
Certainly, even sex worker organizations have said that when we're talking about minors, those under eighteen, there's no question. They themselves identify those who are under eighteen, saying that they should not be here and that they need to be dealt with accordingly.
Here's the problem, practically speaking. If we say that all sex workers who migrate are trafficking victims, what will happen is the same thing that happened with Project Orphan, which I'm sure you remember. Under Canadian law, if you cannot say that you didn't want to come to Canada and you didn't want to work as a sex worker, then you don't qualify as a victim of trafficking, and you are charged, as people were in Project Orphan. Project Orphan was the investigation in Toronto in the late eighties and early nineties that resulted in the arrest of a number of Thai and Malaysian women who had been mistreated and not paid and held in servitude. So in that context, they had been trafficked. But they also said they wanted to come to Canada to work in the sex trade to make lots of money and take it home. That meant they were immediately arrested for being found in a bawdy house, and they were deported to Thailand.
At that point, the outreach workers, like Empower in Thailand, said we sent them home with a black mark on their visa. Now they'll never get a job in Thailand. They didn't want to be sent home that way. They've been arrested. And you say that's a good way to deal with trafficking?
That's the problem in practical policy terms. It ends up being--and it's unfair--the police's responsibility to decide who is a victim and who is not when the victims say they don't want to stop working in the sex work necessarily. Some do. Some really did not want to be there and should have been rescued in that sense. In Australia, the sex worker organizations have said, working with the government, that they identify that there are many foreign workers who came legally to Australia and then chose to work in the sex trade, which is legal in parts of Australia. There are others, maybe 200 to 400, who come on a contract in order to get entry into Australia. They wanted to work in the sex trade, but the contract is difficult. There are maybe 10 who did not want to work in the sex trade and who can be considered trafficked. It's a very small number.
Liberal
Conservative
Joy Smith Conservative Kildonan—St. Paul, MB
I wanted to hear what Mr. Poulin had to say about this as well.
I thank you for your answer, Professor Jeffrey.
Full Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Ottawa
I will be brief. Under the same protocol, the U.N. Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime, which was ratified by Canada, the question of consent for the purposes of defining a victim of trafficking is not relevant. That idea is constantly being put forward by those who defend the sex work perspective, but the Convention does not subscribe to that notion of consent and does not define trafficking on that basis.
Furthermore, what does “consent” really mean? The average age for entering the world of prostitution in Canada is 14. It is even younger in Third World countries. Can there be consent at the age of 14? The most recent study of prostitutes in Vancouver revealed that 95 per cent of them would like to get out of prostitution, if they could. The same study was conducted in Quebec, where the rate was 92 per cent.
The problem we have here in Canada is that there is no service available to prostitutes who want to stop turning tricks. There is nothing available to assist them or help them complete their high school education because, of course, most of them who began at the age of 14 never completed high school. That being the case, they continue to work in the sex industry simply because it provides them with an income. When you haven't got a high school diploma, what kind of income can you expect to earn in the labour market? Is that consent? There is no economic, social or other constraint.
I just want to remind you that 80 per cent of prostitutes in Canada begin turning tricks when they are still minors. That also applies to prostitutes in Thailand and elsewhere. As a result, the question of consent is not relevant.
Liberal
NDP
Irene Mathyssen NDP London—Fanshawe, ON
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you for your work and your presentation today.
I think there are a number of oppressive structures that objectify women and undermine their true equality and economic autonomy. Would empowering women by guaranteeing them economic security help them overcome these oppressive structures? We've been listening to a great deal of information here. Are we failing to get at the root of the tragedy? Are we overlooking something obvious, such as economic autonomy for women?
Associate Professor, Department of History and Politics, University of New Brunswick
Clearly, this is all about economics in the end. For many women, this is the job that's available to them because of the gender division of labour. That's what's out there. That's certainly what women in Thailand told me. That's what women in the Maritimes, where I have just surveyed 64 of them working in sex work, told me. They said this is the best job they can get for the kind of money they can make. That included people working on the street. It might not be what they wanted to do ultimately--for some it was--but it was the best money they could make.
Of course, in the big picture, the more we can address women's economic inequality, the less we're going to have things like trafficking, where people are taken advantage of when they're trying so hard to make money, essentially to get a better job.
With respect to good policy-making, the irony in anti-trafficking prevention programs is that the manufacturing and job training programs that CIDA is undertaking now, say, in Thailand and elsewhere, may actually miss the point, because the people most likely to migrate are those with some skills. They're not the poorest of the poor. The poorest of the poor don't migrate. Those who migrate are those with some education and vision who think there could be a better world. So there is bit of irony in that one.
Nonetheless, I think overall economic preventative measures clearly are going to address all the sorts of problems both of us are identifying.
NDP
Irene Mathyssen NDP London—Fanshawe, ON
One of the things I thought about while I was listening to you was the trade agreements we have internationally. You touched on the fact that there are women and children literally in these slave labour jobs who are making products for Nike, Wal-Mart, and multinationals who operate here in Canada, and they end up being locked up at night and victimized by traffickers. It seems to me that we have an obligation here in terms of who we do business with and our trading agreements. Is there some advice you could give us in that regard?
Associate Professor, Department of History and Politics, University of New Brunswick
I think a big part of it is trading agreements. In my ideal world, if you really want to address the economic inequalities, then we have to address trade relationships in particular. The fact that we pay a tiny percentage of the cost of a cup of coffee tells you everything. Yet here we pay $1.50 or $2 for every cup. I mean, clearly we need more fair trade and better conditions for women's work in all sorts of labour, including, yes, the garment industry. The garment industry is a major problem. If you think of trafficking as exploitation of migrant labour, being held under conditions they did not agree to, even though they agreed to the work, we've got a huge problem with the garment industry in Canada. That needs to be addressed, and that is addressed through economic agreements and trade agreements.
NDP
Irene Mathyssen NDP London—Fanshawe, ON
You've touched on something we discovered in Ontario, which is that new immigrants coming in as garment workers were being exploited by jobbers. They were making pennies at piecework, and they were literally held captive. One of the attempts to resolve that was labour laws that addressed their right to collective bargaining and equal or adequate pay. Of course, we lost all those laws. Do we need to look across this nation at our labour laws and say that women, migrants, people in these really low-paid jobs need to have access to collective bargaining and the freedom this brings to keep them out of these kinds of tragic situations?
Associate Professor, Department of History and Politics, University of New Brunswick
And in part, that's why I would urge the government...again, the Canadian government has not signed on to the migrant workers convention, which has a very interesting method of working that says, look, all governments are responsible even for undocumented migrants and their basic human rights--the basic ones. Being an undocumented person is a problem, but if we want people to become documented migrants, if we want them to join the ranks of legal migrants, then we should not punish them, we should encourage them.
So what the convention asks is that governments lay down the basic protections, but if a worker becomes documented, comes in and legally joins the ranks of workers, then they get extra ones. So things like unemployment insurance become available to those documented workers. So it's a positive approach rather than a negative one, and they will ask them to join unions and what have you so they can fight for their rights as migrant workers.
Again, I think it's unfair to focus just on the sex trade when you have these similar kinds of exploitative working conditions for migrant agricultural labourers, which is a big issue as well in Canada, for garment workers, domestic workers, which for women is huge, and for sex workers. If we address all our measures to sex workers and say everybody's trafficked who enters and therefore they get deported, they're all victims who don't want these jobs, I think you're missing the picture of all those migrant workers who want to work and who want to be protected in that work.
Full Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Ottawa
I'm sorry, but I believe that considering human trafficking and prostitution solely from the perspective of economic inequality is a grave mistake. Whether prostitution involves females -- young girls, young women, or women of any age, or whether it involves males -- boys, young men, transvestites, or transsexuals -- men are essentially the ones using prostitutes. It is a social power relationship where men dominate; it isn't economic inequality.
One can explain the larger scale exploitation of Third World countries as regards prostitution on the basis of economic inequality, but prostitution or human trafficking is not a matter of economic inequality; it revolves around a power relationship between men and women and a deep social inequality between men and women. That clearly results in economic inequality, but to reduce human trafficking to nothing more than an economic issue associated with sex worker migration essentially ignores the fact that this fosters a system of male domination.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Judy Sgro
Thank you, Mr. Poulin.
We're now into the next round of questioning.
Five minutes for Ms. Minna, and then Mr. Stanton.
Liberal
Maria Minna Liberal Beaches—East York, ON
Thank you.
I want to follow-up on what Mr. Poulin just said.
While I understand and accept the fact that the sex trade or the prostitution of children and women that you've just mentioned is about power and control between men and women and is not just economic, at the core it is also an economic issue. As was mentioned, in the eastern European countries, once they had access to jobs, they no longer needed to....
In some cases, they come to Canada because they think they're coming for a job, but they end up being trafficked instead and are forced into it, as you said earlier. Or they come thinking they're coming as exotic dancers and that's as good as they're going to get, because that's how they're going to get around the immigration laws. Otherwise, they can't come, because our immigration laws now are such that women from certain countries, especially if they don't have a level of education or skills, can't come in to do the work. So they come in illegally.
At the core, it's the same issue for women. The motive for the men and the people who traffic them is different. It's greed and power. The women's motives are quite similar in many ways, I understand.
That takes me to some of the things that were mentioned earlier by Ms. Jeffrey, on the issue of immigration laws. The fact is that we know we need domestic workers in this country. We know we need temporary workers, and probably that need will grow more and more. Yet we make it difficult for women to come on regular immigrant visas, as regular immigrants, and to get jobs. We force them to go into situations that are not safe and not protected even by Canadian laws. As you said, in domestic work they may not be getting trafficked in a brothel, but they may be sexually abused by their employer, in which case they're still staying and it's still trafficking of a different kind.
When I was in Sri Lanka, for instance, I met with women who migrated every three months. They would go to work in Saudi Arabia, where they were sexually abused all the time and trafficked among the guys with money, in addition to the work they did in the factory. They never talked about it when they went home. They went to work because they needed women in the factories, and the men stayed home looking after their families. So to me trafficking is not a very linear thing.
Madam Jeffrey, could you give us, in writing, the names of Stella and the other organizations that you suggested we should talk to? I think it would be good for us to talk to as many as we can.
Also, could you tell us how we should be changing the immigration laws? It seems to me that if a person is identified, the women should not be charged and deported. We should institute laws whereby the men in this country are charged with a criminal offence.
If you are using coke or something, you're charged as a user. Why is it that men can get away with using women and children without being charged? It should be the other way around. These men should be charged. If the judges, lawyers, and big megabuck guys who are the ones using ended up on the dockets, and if they knew their names would end up there and they'd be charged with criminal offences if found and if the women mentioned their names or described them, then they might bring it down just a little bit.
So I would say two things: charge the men, and then give the women the right to stay and not deport them. I would say changing the immigration laws somehow would help.