Okay.
First, on the child sex tourism issue, it is very difficult to engage in extraterritorial investigations. There's no doubt about that. The only successful prosecution was with respect to Donald Bakker in British Columbia. He was the first man convicted under the child sex tourism law, and that was an accidental investigation. That he had sexually exploited children abroad was only discovered after his computer was seized.
So how do other countries do it? That's sort of our approach. Other countries are regularly prosecuting their foreign pedophiles who go abroad. And they really operate with impunity. In Cambodia, you can see them walking down the street arm in arm with girls who are 8, 9, or 10 years old, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it there.
They deal with it through liaison officers in the embassies. The Australian federal police have liaison officers. The Americans have law enforcement officers, not in every embassy, but in the focused, highest-risk areas. They don't just work on human trafficking and child sex tourism; they also deal with drug trade issues and other transnational organized crimes. So it's largely an enforcement issue at this point.
The RCMP have been given information about Canadian pedophiles operating abroad, as detailed as passport copies, trip manifests, and even witness statements. We were able to provide them with these types of evidence. We actually participated successfully in the prosecution of an American pedophile, using the same model. The Americans were able to send a team, they investigated, and this resulted in a conviction.
Unfortunately, the way our law works, when we have a foreign pedophile operating abroad like this—bouncing between countries and never coming back to Canada—there's no way to get him. Also you're not able to hold Canadian citizens at the border when they return, unless you have enough evidence against them to result in an arrest warrant. So it is very difficult, but it can be done, and the answer, in our view, is resources and a liaison officer program.
Now, on the question of the interdepartmental working group, why would an office be better? The main issue we see is there needs to be a central focal point for funding for human trafficking, because right now we'd be at a loss to say there is any funding going to human trafficking, other than for the meetings of the interdepartmental working group and the poster campaign at the federal level. So there needs to be a focal point, which is also important for accountability.
We see this office as being able to develop and propose initiatives that go back to the individual departments that are involved. So rather than having 17 departments around the table discussing what would really involve programs in only two or three of them, why not have a central office with expertise in human trafficking, bring together the best people in Canada to work in this office, give them the funding they need, and give them a mandate to liaise with the relevant departments?
We see this as a new approach that could work. Other countries have done so, and it has resulted in increased accountability—and, I should add, the office would report to Parliament. There should be a report to Parliament on how many victims have been assisted, how many have been repatriated, and how many traffickers have been investigated and charged. This is information that as a country we don't have right now.