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.