I'll start.
Housing is the number one biggest need that's requested for a referral service through the hotline. This often looks like emergency housing when they're trying to exit, but it's precarious housing and lack of affordable housing solutions overall that are putting our youth in this vulnerable situation. It's disgusting to say out loud, but traffickers actually look for individuals who aren't having their basic needs met in order to lure and groom them into sex trafficking.
While a lot of the awareness materials talk about luring and grooming someone with expensive purses and clothes, unfortunately more often than not it's also the promise of a safe place to sleep and the promise of unconditional love. While there are absolutely needs for trauma-informed shelters across the country, we also need to be looking at the affordable housing situation.
I want to say on the emergency shelter issue that we're seeing it crumble across the country in small communities and large. We will even get calls in the middle of the night from survivors looking to exit in cities as big as Ottawa and Montreal, where there's not a single shelter bed available in the city to house them. That doesn't even mean that they are necessarily trauma-informed or suitable for the needs of survivors. Really, we're seeing the housing system's collapse directly aggravate the experiences of human trafficking in our country.