Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Good morning.
Does every member of the committee have a copy of our brief? I'll be referring to it in the interests of time. Okay, great. So I'll submit that for the committee's consideration. I'm just going to focus today on what I think are the top level recommendations and proposals that The Future Group has.
To start with, we're honoured to be here. Our organization was founded in 2000 by a group of university students sitting around a lake and talking about this problem of human trafficking that we heard about six years ago. It's an honour to be here finally in Ottawa to talk before you today about it. So thank you very much for the opportunity, and I applaud you for studying this problem.
As many of you know, our organization started doing its work overseas. We've led on-the-ground fieldwork projects with victims in Cambodia, Myanmar, Romania, Moldova, and, most recently, this summer in Ecuador and in Cameroon. Our attention focused back on Canada, on Calgary--I'm from Calgary originally--when the police raided a massage parlour and found, lo and behold, women from Southeast Asia. People have since forgotten about that story; that was in 2003.
Since then we've started to focus on this issue in Canada on a policy level. Based on our experience overseas, we've developed essentially a three-point framework. It's outlined on page 1. It starts to balance some of the concerns this committee has heard today and in previous witness testimony about how do you balance the law enforcement aspects, the human rights aspects, the economic aspects. This is our approach.
First is prevention of human trafficking by working with source countries to address the root causes, which involve a lack of knowledge, so educating at-risk children. Organizations educate 80,000 at-risk children in rural Cambodia, for example, dealing with the situation there. Also, direct foreign aid to increasing economic opportunities for young women. That's the first part of the framework.
The second part of the framework is protection of trafficking victims. This includes both the rescue and then subsequently the rehabilitation, or where appropriate, repatriation, and then their reintegration into society, whether it's appropriate for them to go home or not.
The final part is the prosecution of traffickers and commercial sex users in criminal proceedings. So it's all three that you need; otherwise, it's just a drop in the bucket and progress is difficult, if not impossible.
Many of you are familiar with the report that our organization published in March of this year called Falling Short of the Mark. It was an international study on the treatment of human trafficking victims, and I'm embarrassed to say Canada got a failing grade. The summary of our report is in pages 2 to 4 of our brief, and if you're interested in the full version with all the comparative examples, it's on our website, which is www.thefuturegroup.org. I apologize for the shameless plug, Madam Chair, of our website.
I do want to draw your attention in particular to page 3 of our brief. This is a case study that is cited in our report in a footnote. We were told after our report that, no, there's no evidence that trafficking victims are deported, it's all anecdotal, it doesn't happen. Here's an official report from the Federal Court judicially reviewing a decision of the Immigration and Refugee Board.
It's the case of Katalin Varga, one of the few that made it up this high. You can only wonder how she had the legal resources to make it so high. I don't know; someone must have been supporting her. I'd like you to read on page 4 here, and this is a summary of the case from the reporter:
Varga's doctor indicated she was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and would suffer a complete psychological breakdown if she were returned to Hungary.
She was found to be a bona fide human trafficking victim. Canada's response: deport her. This is the current state of the law. We now have interim guidelines that begin to address this problem. Our organization applauded the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration when these were announced. I agree with the comments earlier; it's a good starting point, and more can be done.
Some of you are aware I was involved in that process as well. I'm not here to talk about my capacity in that, but just to say that our approach has been internationally that you want to make measurable steps. I would caution the committee against trying to come up with a grand national plan all at once. First of all, by the time you come up with the plan, the traffickers have already moved on.
We need to support projects that are working, focus our efforts in areas of greatest concern, both geographically...and I'd point out that Vancouver, with the coming Vancouver Winter Olympics, should be a major concern of this committee. By 2010, if Canada does not have its act together on combating human trafficking, there will be a surge of human trafficking in British Columbia. International practice at every major world sporting event in the last decade, in addition to peacekeeping missions, has shown that a large influx of that hard currency and foreigners with a lot of time on their hands and a sense of impunity will essentially drive this industry. You have to approach it from a crude angle, which is a business angle sometimes, and you can see that the traffickers will see this as a windfall.
I'll leave for your consideration our recommendations, which are set out in our brief on page 7. We've called for the creation of a counter-trafficking office. I'd like to answer questions, if you have them, about why that's needed, but I'll have to defer those to the question period, since I'm out of time.
Thank you again for the opportunity today.