Evidence of meeting #2 for Status of Women in the 43rd Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was workers.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Professor, University of Alberta, As an Individual
Yes. I wanted to go back to the issue of respect that was mentioned. If we think back to George Orwell, we know or we believe that if we take a word out of a language, the concept ceases to exist. In Canada, we don't even count personal support workers and care aides accurately. We don't track their wages easily or accurately. We don't assess the quality of work life that they have routinely. They're not paid very well. They're not educated very well. In English-speaking provinces, half of them in urban centres don't speak English as a first language, and the testing for whether that's sufficient to give care is variable across the country.
Those are just symptoms of how we don't respect and regard for this workforce that is looking after a population that we don't respect and regard very much. We have to think of nursing homes as places that are driven by dementia care. Dementia is on the rise; we're getting older and it's not going to slow down. There will very likely always be a smaller population of people with dementia who are going to need nursing care, and if you need it in a nursing home, it's the right place to be if the care is acceptable.
Recently, a survey in the U.S. reported that half of the people surveyed said they'd rather die than go to a nursing home. That' just not okay. We have a high-income country and these are all issues of values. I can't think of an existential fear greater than that of dying alone, but that's exactly what happened during COVID, and it's still happening for these older people—often women.
I think we need to step back and ask, how do those values influence us? When we say that we must have data—and we all say this—we don't just need quality of care data or data on wages. What we need data about is how this workforce is managing. Are they resilient? Are they able to manage the clientele they have? Do they have the right education? Did they ever get continuing education? Do they get child care? What about their aging parents at home?
In the matter of unpaid family caregivers, we have relied disproportionately on family to carry the burden of what we don't want to pay for as a country. By 2050 there will be a third less family caregivers, who are largely women, and that will —
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Marilyn Gladu
I'm really sorry, but that's the end of our time. I really apologize.
I wish I could listen to our witnesses all day. You have so much information to share, but I'd invite you to send any other comments you want to make to the clerk. I want to thank you for your time.
We're going to suspend the meeting for two minutes to do a sound check of our next panel. We'll do that now and we'll be back in two minutes.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Marilyn Gladu
All right. We're resuming.
Our second panel today is on human trafficking and on support for sex workers. We have with us as witnesses Julie Bauman, the co-founder and executive director for SafeSpace London; Jenny Duffy, the board chair for Maggie's Toronto; and, Julia Drydyk, the executive director of the Canadian Centre to End Human Trafficking.
I understand that Julie Bauman and Jenny Duffy are going to share their time.
I'll leave you to share your 10 minutes. I'll put one finger up when you get one minute away from the end. We'll have Julia after that.
Jenny and Julie, go ahead.
Julie Bauman Co-Founder and Executive Director, SafeSpace London
Hi. My name is Julie Bauman, and I'm the executive director of SafeSpace London. I'm joined by my colleague Jenny Duffy, who is the board chair of Maggie's sex workers action project. Thank you for the invitation to speak with you today.
SafeSpace London is our city's only organization centring the needs of sex workers and guided for the past 11 years by our mission to nurture a community of mutual care by, with and for sex workers.
Jenny Duffy Board Chair, Maggie's: The Toronto Sex Workers Action Project
Maggie's is Canada's oldest by and for sex workers' rights organization, which exists to provide community support services and advocates for the dignity and safety of sex workers.
For the sake of clarity, it is important to emphasize at the outset that as organizations with and of sex workers, SafeSpace London and Maggie's honours and supports the strength, wisdom, experiences, freedom and agency of sex workers who choose to engage in sex work and who wish to work in a safe and dignified work environment—just like workers in any other profession—while also opposing any kind of exploited or coerced labour for sexual purposes.
On the ground, SafeSpace London offers a safe and secure community drop-in space for women and gender minorities who either currently or formerly have engaged in sex work. They offer companionship, the sharing of wisdom, clothing, food, information about bad dates, access to the Internet, harm-reduction related equipment and linkage to other services.
Co-Founder and Executive Director, SafeSpace London
All of this changed dramatically as soon as the COVID-19 pandemic hit in the spring of 2020. While social distancing can be an inconvenience to those who are more comfortably situated within our communities, for those who are isolated, abandoned and otherwise left for dead by both governmental bodies and social services, this kind of enforced distancing can be absolutely death-dealing.
During the pandemic, everyone has suffered in some way, but the most vulnerable, to say the most oppressed, suffer in ways that are unbearable, humiliating and extremely painful. As one woman who came to our space early on in the pandemic said to one of our coordinators, with tears in her eyes, “You are my last hug.”
First off, overnight at SafeSpace, we were no longer able to host community members within our small space. Instead, we were only able to offer a very brief, socially distanced peer contact with community members outside of our space, in the parking lot, with no privacy or shelter from weather.
Board Chair, Maggie's: The Toronto Sex Workers Action Project
Prior to COVID-19, Maggie's provided street outreach and in-person programming, which included community meals, drop-in legal services, support groups and indigenous-specific programming. Due to the pandemic, we have been challenged to shift our programs online. However, many of our service users lack access to stable Internet connections, and as a result, our indigenous programming in particular has seen a significant drop in participation.
Secondly, the inability of community members to access previously open public spaces has meant that now many lack access to any kind of washroom. Public washrooms are vital spaces for individuals with limited options in our community to have a place to wash their hair and body in the sink, to change, rest while working and to use a toilet. COVID closures left no space for these needs.
Co-Founder and Executive Director, SafeSpace London
It took us several weeks of sustained advocacy on behalf of our community members before the City of London finally installed a porta-potty by our address. However, porta-potties, as we all know, are not exactly as safe, clean or private.... The City chose this simply because it was the cheapest, which again demonstrates the ways in which people actually view those classified as priority populations.
Our ability to continue to rent at our location, which we chose not only due to its cost but because of where it is in relation to sex work that occurs in our city, is now in jeopardy because of the backlash to the porta-potty.
Board Chair, Maggie's: The Toronto Sex Workers Action Project
Thirdly, at Maggie's, where many of our service users struggle already to meet their material needs, the pandemic and the exclusion from the Canadian emergency response benefit put them at even further disadvantage. Due to the lack of government response, we took aid into our own hands and established a mutual aid fund, which received donations totalling over $100,000 that we disbursed to sex workers across the industry who are now struggling to provide for their very basic needs.
While Maggie's has received international praise for establishing one of the biggest mutual aid funds in North America, we continually remind the public that we should never have needed to do this. The creation of a mutual aid fund was the last resort to the government failing vulnerable communities, despite already having heard from countless advocacy groups, including sex workers themselves—receiving thousands of pages of empirical evidence across social service and legal fields—that decriminalization is the first step to an equitable existence for sex workers, and that sex workers are labourers who are entitled to access government support and labour protections just as any other worker.
Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, when the COVID-19 pandemic first hit, numerous other community services raised barriers and began to serve fewer people. Meal programs closed, shelters were overcapacity and many organizations stopped taking new referrals. Almost all community services moved from in-person conversations to virtual or telephone conversations with clients.
We saw an explosion of need in our community. In the sex work community, there is newly created job insecurity. Our community is being further stigmatized due to the government's handling of the pandemic, and without evidence, ordering the closing of safer spaces to work, such as adult entertainment facilities.
Co-Founder and Executive Director, SafeSpace London
A lot of people ended up with nowhere to go for food, nowhere to go for diapers for their babies. A lot of people ended up feeling lonely, stigmatized, with nowhere to go for support or companionship. We recognized the great need in the London community and we committed ourselves as well as we could to pushing onward, because we chose to expand our support to other oppressed, impoverished, criminalized, dispossessed people. We did receive some emergency funding grants, which have supported us to attain PPE and proper sanitization, and we have received some additional support for providing hot meals and other basic-needs items.
As a result, the number of people coming to us for assistance has increased dramatically. We do this, despite what it costs, because we feel that nobody, regardless of who they are, regardless of our particular area of focus, should be abandoned and left to die. Indeed, it costs us. We've literally pooled our own money together to house people when they were turned away from full shelters and couldn't access other organizations to help with funds for hotel rooms. It cost us as individuals as we are trying to meet a far greater need, who are volunteering longer hours without any compensation, all while many of our own jobs are being legislated again, and many of our own bodies are being treated as high risk or dangerous to the public.
Our hours have been expanded from being open three days a week and serving 80 unique individuals before COVID, to now being open five days a week. We went from serving no hot meals pre-COVID, as doing that is not a core mission of our service delivery, to now serving hot meals six days a week to 200 unique individuals. It costs us because we are people who care. We are doing everything we possibly can just to help anyone and everyone to survive.
We are still working through the repercussions of these costs.
Board Chair, Maggie's: The Toronto Sex Workers Action Project
Being sidelined while being told you are a priority population is expensive. It costs us.
Thank you very much.
Conservative
Julia Drydyk Executive Director, Canadian Centre to End Human Trafficking
I would like to thank the members of the committee for having me here today. My name is Julia Drydyk. I'm the executive director of the Canadian Centre to End Human Trafficking. The centre is a national charity dedicated to ending all forms of human trafficking in Canada. We work to mobilize systems change by collaborating and working with various stakeholders to advance best practices, share research and eliminate duplicate efforts across Canada.
In May 2019 the centre launched the Canadian human trafficking hotline, a confidential, multilingual service that operates 24-7 to connect victims and survivors with social services and/or law enforcement, if they so choose. One of the questions we get asked the most is whether or not we have seen an increase or decrease in calls to the hotline since COVID-19. What I can say definitively is that human trafficking has not decreased in any capacity since the pandemic. While there are ebbs and flows in the volume of the calls we receive, overall the demand for our service has been stable over the last six months.
On the other hand, we have no quantitative evidence to suggest that there's been a significant increase in the prevalence of human trafficking since the pandemic started. Our average weekly and monthly call volumes are pretty consistent with what we were experiencing prior to COVID. While we have seen a slight increase in call volumes, this could be due to a number of other factors, such as it being our first year of operation, or our ongoing improvements and adjustments to our outreach and communication strategies, meaning we're doing a bit of a better job of targeting the people who directly benefit from our services.
I want to take a moment to talk a little bit about the impact the pandemic has had on our ability to do our work and serve the victims and survivors of human trafficking across Canada. Like many non-profit organizations across the country, we had to adapt really quickly to the COVID-19 pandemic. As soon as the lockdowns began, we had to find a way to transition to remote operations. While this has been a learning curve for everyone at the centre, we're very fortunate to be working safely from home. We've been functioning at full capacity in operations since April.
However, many of our front-line service delivery partners experienced far greater challenges in providing services. As soon as the lockdowns began, we issued a survey to 755 of our service delivery partners across Canada, coupled with extensive follow-up and online research to update our national referral directory. The results of that were quite shocking to us. In April and May of 2020, roughly one in every five, or 22%, of the total number of individual services and programs available to our hotline callers were not being offered at all or weren't accepting new referrals because of the pandemic. In addition, 71% of the programs and services in our national referral directory were still accepting referrals, but they had implemented changes to how they were providing services, including such things as reduced or modified hours of service, remote or digital service only, the prioritization of crisis over non-urgent referrals, and of course the introduction of health and safety guidelines for shelters and residential programs.
All of these protocols created additional barriers for victims and survivors looking to access services. For example, we heard that some survivors struggled to maintain emergency housing services, as many really struggled to comply with the COVID precautions. As an example of this, if a survivor leaves a shelter to visit friends or family, or to try to access a food bank, they may not be allowed back because of the risk of exposing other shelter residents to COVID-19. Some survivors have also mentioned that the physical restrictions that have been placed on them during quarantine reminded them of their trafficking situation, which can be both triggering and re-traumatizing.
Shelters having also been reaching capacity more quickly due to the requirements of physical distancing. This is decreasing the overall number of beds available to human trafficking survivors. Some survivors have lost altogether their access to such needed services and supports as drop-in programs and counselling services. Survivors have simply had fewer supports available to them because of COVID.
In conclusion, I want to emphasis that sex trafficking survivors are often placed in a continuum of sexual and gender-based exploitation. I really do applaud the work of this committee for including this issue as part of its broader research agenda. I would also encourage the committee to consider what the impacts might be for women who are experiencing sex and labour trafficking. There are gender dimensions of labour trafficking as well, especially in home care and garment and manufacturing sectors, that require additional research. We're currently working on how to improve engagement with those communities, as they can be traditionally hard to reach, but anecdotal evidence from the field suggests that we're only scratching the surface in understanding the depth and breadth of labour trafficking in Canada.
Again, thank you very much for the invitation. I'd be happy to answer any questions I can.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Marilyn Gladu
Excellent.
We will go now to our first round of questioning. Everyone will have six minutes. I apologize to the witnesses in advance: I cut people off at six minutes so that everyone will get a chance to ask their questions.
Ms. Sahota is splitting her time with Ms. Shin.
Ms. Shin.
Conservative
Nelly Shin Conservative Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC
Thank you so much. I just want to thank all of the guests today for the incredible work that you do to give women dignity. This is a very sensitive area and a topic that really is rooted in the concept of slavery and the demoralization of women on so many levels. I applaud you for approaching this with compassion, and I thank you, especially during this very difficult time with COVID and the complications caused by that.
I would like to direct my question to Ms. Drydyk. Globally, the United Nations has reported that COVID-19 has driven human trafficking further underground and made it more difficult to identify cases of human trafficking, and that strains the capacity of enforcement agencies and non-governmental organizations that provide services to victims of crime.
In what ways has the COVID-19 pandemic driven human trafficking further underground? Could you elaborate on the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting the capacity of enforcement agencies and non-governmental organizations to provide services to victims and survivors of human trafficking?
Executive Director, Canadian Centre to End Human Trafficking
Absolutely. Thank you for the question.
I want to start off by saying that as an organization, we're very clear in differentiating between consensual sex work and trafficking. However, what we see in Canada is that there is human trafficking that exists within the commercial sex market, so we're very clear on that front.
One of the major trends we see in where and how human trafficking is taking place in Canada is that is largely through hotels, motels, Airbnbs and the online escort industry. I have to say, based on what we've been monitoring, there are no evidence-based trends to validate the claim that we're seeing the same push into the underground market. Folks who may be working more closely and more on the ground, also with consensual sex workers, might understand some of the impacts that has had, but largely we're still seeing that this is operating in that space of online escort services.
Conservative
Nelly Shin Conservative Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC
Thank you for that. With regard to this happening in hotels and motels and with online escort services, how can hotels and the other spaces where this is taking place co-operate more, and what would that co-operation look like?
Executive Director, Canadian Centre to End Human Trafficking
The hotels have been quite strong in starting preliminary training with many of their staff. We would like to see training across the board, but they have made good inroads.
Where we're seeing a major gap is with Airbnb. Often the people renting out the premises will never see the people renting it, so there aren't those kinds of checks and balances that allow you to pick up on the signs of exploitation.
One of the things we offer is a hotline to provide that immediate education and support for people who are seeing something that doesn't seem right, to really help them differentiate between indicators of human trafficking versus consensual sex work.
Often, we will get people from hotels and the service industry calling and suggesting that they're seeing something that seems suspicious, and really we look for those indicators of comprehensive exploitation, such as individuals who aren't able to speak for themselves, who are not talking for themselves, whose ID or other pieces of money might have been taken away from them, or where there are signs that they are being physically controlled.
Conservative
Jag Sahota Conservative Calgary Skyview, AB
I want to start by thanking all of the witnesses for their testimony and time. I will be asking questions of Ms. Julia Drydyk.
I'll just call you Julia if that's okay.
Executive Director, Canadian Centre to End Human Trafficking
That's completely fine. Thank you.
Conservative
Jag Sahota Conservative Calgary Skyview, AB
Julia, in your testimony you said that you haven't seen the volume of calls increase in the last six months. Well, we've been in a pandemic for longer than that. I'm just wondering if you saw an increase at the beginning of the pandemic?
Executive Director, Canadian Centre to End Human Trafficking
No. I will be honest, too, in that we had to suspend operations for about two weeks at the beginning of the lockdown because we weren't able to create a safe space for our colleagues. Through our funding agreement with Public Safety at that time, we were prohibited from working remotely because of the sensitivity of our data. We suspended operations entirely for two weeks and then were able to start up partial operations until we were able to go completely 24-7 again. There we saw some disruptions in our services, but it also took a little while to be able to get back to our normal volume.
There has been an increase, controlling for that period of time when we weren't operating at full capacity. We've seen about a 20% increase in signal volume since COVID began. Again, that's not insignificant, but we can't specifically attribute it to one part of COVID. We don't know if it's because there's additional exploitation taking place of people who might have been really poorly affected socio-economically from COVID.
We have no direct insight into how it might have affected the sex market generally as well. Because we really meet people where they are and we just focus entirely on providing them those services they need in that moment, we just have not been seeing those same forms of trends.
Conservative