Thank you.
I'd like to thank Mr. Malarek for his presentation. I like the use of your very strong words “oppression” and “modern-day slavery”, and about how women get into that from abject poverty. Those are very strong words, and I congratulate you for using them and continuing to use them. It's something we aren't strong enough on, I think, in this country.
I actually wanted to physically applaud when you were speaking, because you touched a nerve with me on this. I've seen your documentary, The Natashas. It was very moving, very well done.
I want to talk about Canada, where prostitution is not legal but is happening everywhere, in every city. If you just walk down the street at night, you can meet the victims. You see ads in newspapers, as you've mentioned. You can look on the Internet.
I've unhappily found instances myself. I was searching for something and typed in “women”. Boy! I got all kinds of interesting sites that I wasn't interested in. They're there, and as you say, they're very easy to find. I've seen in my local papers advertising for “nice, clean girls”, “exotic women”—all these advertisements. As you say, if you click on “massage”, you get ads for prostitutes. Even though this is illegal in Canada, it's happening. How do we stop this? How do we expose it, I guess, for what it is?
There are also the effects on first nations in this country, because of some of the situations, the abject poverty on some of the reserves in this country. I come from British Columbia. You probably know about the downtown eastside of Vancouver, where a lot of women, because of prostitution, drugs, and the poverty that brings them to the cities, get caught up in this and are victimized, and quite often killed.
There is all that. I think we have to recognize that it's happening within our country, and not just outside. So there's that piece of it.
But I also want to talk about our trade policy, which in some ways created in us a want or a desire for more and cheaper products, which created sweatshops in other countries and poverty, because when you aren't paying people enough to eat and live and raise a family because we want cheaper prices.... We know about the sweatshop situation, and how our greed, our consumption, has maybe kept this going around the world—not just in Canada, but in the western world in general.