Western nations have to take a lead role in this, and Canada is placed to take the lead role on it. The United States has the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons of the U.S. State Department, which has done a pretty good job in highlighting the cesspools of debauchery around the world. However, it plays a diplomatic dance over this issue. It does not identify the countries that are the true problems around the globe because it has to deal with so many of its NATO partners and all the diplomacy that comes into play. Canada has always had a stellar role on human rights around the world, and that's what we should look at. We stand up for the dignity of women. We stand up for the dignity of children. We stand up for the dignity of senior citizens. We stand up for these issues. It's important that we continue to stand.
When you look at the issue within Canada, the reality, and recognize the reality that we do have a serious problem on the streets in parts of Vancouver, the north end of Winnipeg, Toronto, Edmonton, and wherever, and a lot are trafficked out of native reserves, this is internal trafficking, which is a significant problem around the world. There is internal trafficking in Russia and Thailand and places like that. We have to deal with that issue as well. Again, we allow these women to be victimized, because we don't go after the perpetrator. The perpetrator is the guy with the cash in his pocket. These women are forced out into these situations, and again we go back to this whole thing about a patriarchal society. Women have to stand up and men have to stand up with women and say we will not allow this to happen. Again, when they're that poor or forced into situations, women do not have a choice. The guy with the buck in his pocket has the choice. We have to stop that.
Western nations also have to offer programs and incentives to countries like Thailand and Russia and Ukraine and the Philippines and South American countries, where these women are being trafficked from, to give them a chance at life. It is easy to get a visa or to get into the Netherlands or Germany within 48 hours to be a prostitute, but you'll never get a visa to work in McDonald's. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't balance in my reality. Yet with these countries, go to places like Ukraine or Russia and say we have jobs for your girls because the local women have jobs. If they have jobs and this is what you want to offer them, that says a lot about society today.
We have to be careful in Canada that we don't play into that. Women are and will always be victims in this trade. The vast majority of them loathe this thing. Of the ones I have spoken to, there are a handful of happy hookers out there. Great on them, if that's what they want to do. But when you start to talk to these girls, they tell you that they want out and they can't get out. The Netherlands has a program to allow girls to escape, and yet they don't apply it. They don't apply it. Sweden has a program, and huge numbers have applied and have got out.