Thank you.
First of all, I'd like to thank all of you members of the committee for your public service. I'd like thank all members of the committee and all the witnesses for all the important work you're doing for the status of women and for trafficked women in Canada.
Where do I start? I'm having flashbacks to my three-minute thesis competition at the University of Manitoba back when I did my dissertation, but I'll see what I can touch on in five minutes, and then I'll be open to questions afterwards.
I've been in policing for 34 years. I started in recruit class in Winnipeg, Manitoba, during the aboriginal justice inquiry. In my 34 years, I've seen a lot of change, a lot of evolution in social issues and a lot of change in the way that we approach them. One unfortunate scourge that we've made some headway on but on which I think we still have a long way to go is in the trafficking of women and the exploitation of children.
When it came time to select a topic for my Ph.D. research in 2016, I thought back to my career, what I felt most passionate and challenged about and where I might be able to make the most headway, and I chose to go back to the work that I'd done in counter-exploitation 10 years prior.
In the study that I did in 2016, I tried to take a broader approach, include more voices than had been included in all of the previous research that I'd found and really go from the ground and talk to this wider selection of voices to find out what I could do to possibly, by raising their voices, make some headway on this issue. Those voices included politicians, political leaders, policy-makers, influencers, people working in government and non-government organizations, and then, of course, the most important of all, the trafficked women who trusted me with their stories to take forward. I take that as a sacred commitment to try to properly represent what they told me in venues like this.
In the end, given my short time to speak here to start off with, I want to say that I took a lot of my findings, a lot of them oriented around the structural violence and the structural oppression that a lot of women and children face in Canada that depreciate their resilience and their resistance to being caught up in the sex industry, and I boiled all of those findings and recommendations down into a table in the back of this book that I wrote with the University of Toronto Press. I'm bringing this table to your attention because I think it would be of great value to everyone on this committee to have a look at this book and the table in the back, where I've spelled out specific findings and recommendations.