Status of Women Committee on May 1st, 2023

[Timea E. Nagy]

Thank you so much.

I believe there should be programs available that do not just focus on the victim mindset—immediate shelter, money and immediate safe housing—but on employment and life skills training, such as how you handle money and how you get back to your life. A lot of the programs that are being funded focus solely on putting a victim in a safe house or in a program for two years, treating them like victims, with everything being done for them.

That means that two years are taken away from this individual for potential personal growth. For two years this victim is basically forced to stay in the system on welfare, and so and so forth. The time spent on that should be reduced. Instead of putting them in long-term safe houses, offer them transitional stages where they get assisted living slowly. First they pay $20, then they pay $80, and so on, transitioning them out of victimhood to survival to try to work and be healthy members of society.

[Lori Idlout, NDP, Nunavut, NU]

Thank you so much.

With your expertise in ensuring that survivors are getting the supports they need, I wonder if, in your opinion, your organization receives enough funding to address the violence experienced by survivors of sex trafficking.

[Timea E. Nagy]

You might be shocked to learn this, but I've been in this movement for 15 years and my organization and my former charity have never received any funding. We were denied for probably 15 grants in total. We spent in total $40,000 applying for these grants, and we were constantly denied, including programs such as you mentioned: employment programs, self-development programs and so on.

[Lori Idlout, NDP, Nunavut, NU]

Could you explain some of the reasons your grants might have been rejected, and could you provide recommendations to make sure that the great work you do is not rejected?

[Timea E. Nagy]

I a would love to give you an explanation, but we were never given any. It's usually, “Unfortunately, at this time.... Thank you so much”.

[Lori Idlout, NDP, Nunavut, NU]

I'm sorry to hear that.

I would like to turn to a different area. I understand that you are currently working with the police. Could you explain what training you are providing to the police?

[Timea E. Nagy]

Thank you so much.

My current branch of Timea's Cause is called TC Online Institute. We created an online education and training program for law enforcement for the very reason.... It's affordable, and everyone can get it. The hope was that eventually the government would reach out and we could work with the government to put this training out. Unfortunately, again, we were denied funding and support for that. So, now the police agencies are kind of left to their own devices and whatever grant they can get to purchase these courses. The good news is that the up-to-40-hour human trafficking detection course is now being adopted by the Canadian Police Knowledge Network, which is Canada's top online institute for law enforcement.

We have the potential to reach all police officers in Canada, but, again, it's not a mandate; it's just hit and miss, whoever wants it. The Peel Regional Police took the initiative to mandate that all 2,200 officers get our training. Other agencies came along as well, but we are far from reaching all officers. The training has received five stars so far.

[Lori Idlout, NDP, Nunavut, NU]

Would you have any recommendations to the committee to make sure that more training is being provided to the police?

[Timea E. Nagy]

I do. Unfortunately, I understand that, once the government says it's a mandate, then the government has to put money behind it, which is usually not the case. My suggestion would be, yes, make the training a mandate federally. I don't see that happening, but that is definitely my recommendation.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Lori, thank you so much. You'll get back two and a half minutes shortly.

We're going to start on our second round. It's going to be five minutes; five minutes; two and a half minutes to the Bloc and two and a half minutes to the NDP. I'm going to start off with Dominique.

Dominique Vien, you have the floor for five minutes.

[Dominique Vien, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

I would also like to thank this morning's guests.

As Ms. Larouche said, we have heard some very disturbing, blood-curdling testimony. Unfortunately, we can well imagine that trafficking of women, and men as well, exists in this country. However, when it happens within a couple's relationship, within a family, how horrific!

Thankfully, we talk a lot about the victims. This committee gives a lot of space to victims and survivors. I don't want to give space to these men, to avoid glorifying them.

On the other hand, I want to ask you this question: what do we know about these abusers? How do we manage to track them down and stop them?

Ms. Nagy, I'll get back to you a little later. I saw you raise your hand and I'm glad to see your interest.

Maybe we can start with Ms. MacDonald or Ms. Sarson, as they are the ones who told us about this chilling case.

What do we know about these abusers? Can we catch them? What happened to the husband and his friends who chained up the man's wife and abused her? What happened to these men?

[Linda MacDonald]

Of the perpetrators we know, none of them have ever been taken to court because the women are too terrified to go to the police because they're not believed. They're seen as mentally ill when they talk about torture in Canada. We only want to think about state torture. If they go to torture centres even, they're told they don't fit because their crime is not state torture.

The husband and those three men, I mentioned, nothing ever happened to him. Nothing's ever happened to any of the parents of women who have come forward. They are well-respected people living in the community— politicians, police, doctors, lawyers, many of them upper class and very powerful. They're still walking the streets, the torturers we know. That's a very tragic story.

If we had a law in Canada, then women might feel comfortable in saying, “Yes, torture does happen to me. I know you believe it because we have a law.”

Then we would start getting the data. We would start educating the police, the judicial system, the health care system, all of the systems and provide services of healing for women and girls who were tortured.

Right now there are no services for them of any kind.

[Dominique Vien, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

Ms. Nagy, you have the floor.

[Timea E. Nagy]

Thank you. I love your question

We've been saying for many years that we also need an equal amount of research and work done on the traffickers. Again, funding wasn't provided, so we ended up getting private funding. It took me eight years, but I visited a jail to interview Canada's most dangerous offender and the most famous pimp in our history. I sat down and had a two-day interview with him to find out his side of the story. When I listened to his story, I realized he was sexually exploited. He was raped. He fell under the radar. His father was an abusive human being. Of course, under those traumatized childhood circumstances, he, instead of becoming a victim, turned out to be a perpetrator.

In his testimony in jail he talks to the young pimps who are coming into jail and traffickers. In his opinion 70% to 80% of those traffickers who are traffickers today have a very similar childhood story. When I keep saying we need prevention, I don't just talk about the need to prevent little girls from being trafficked. I'm talking about little boys needing to have this conversation about being a pimp and being a trafficker not being an answer to their childhood trauma.

[Dominique Vien, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

That was actually the focus of this committee when we talked about domestic violence or violence within a couple. We said that we need to educate young boys about this issue. We need to do prevention and educate people about this issue.

Ms. Sharifi, you talked about five signals that are available online which women can use. In a nutshell, what are they?

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Timea, just because it's been so crazy with technical difficulties and things like that, I'm going to ask you to make that response in writing to our committee about the five that you you talked about. We'd appreciate it. If you could write that to our committee, I'd really appreciate it.

Thank you.

I'm sorry, Dominique. I'm cutting you off.

Sonia, you have the floor for five minutes.

[Sonia Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton South, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I want to share my time with Marc Serré.

I want to say thank you to all the witnesses today, and a special thanks to Timea.

I know [Inaudible—Editor]. Thank you for all the training you did under Chief Nishan and Deputy Chief Marc. You trained 2,200 officers.

There's one thing I want to put on the record. We are all working on this. Even the parliamentary secretary is engaged on this matter. We are working towards a solution and the funding you were talking about.

We all know it's helpful that the Peel police are working hard to combat human trafficking. Can you tell us how it could be effective to train all police officers in this?

[Timea E. Nagy]

Thank you so much. I appreciate your question.

Obviously, we need a comprehensive effort. Training police officers is one of the first important steps. If a police officer attends to a call where the victim is at the very beginning of this journey and recognizes the signs, they have the opportunity to have a conversation and get this victim out of the situation—before the victim ends up in this situation for longer than a month, two months or a year. The sooner the victim gets pulled out of the situation, the shorter amount of time they'll be traumatized and the shorter time they'll need to heal and rebuild their life.

When I say it costs $785,000 per person to rehabilitate a victim, that is when a victim has stayed in that extremely harmful situation for a longer period of time. The shorter the period of time a victim is in the situation and the sooner they are recognized, the sooner they'll be pulled out of the situations and can rehabilitate their life and find their way back to society.

[Sonia Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton South, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I will pass my time over to Marc.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Thank you, Sonia.

Thank you to all of the witnesses.

I have two questions. The first is for Tiana.

We went to northern Ontario and Sault Ste. Marie. Over the last five years, we've heard of more gangs coming in. Obviously, human trafficking is related to gangs. We've heard that from other witnesses.

You shifted the focus to the social media aspect. With the pandemic, the role of social media now is enticing and making things a lot worse. We've had some government legislation. The big companies don't like us doing anything related to.... They'll call it “censorship” or whatever. It's big tech.

Can you give us some specific recommendations on what we can do, as a federal government, to regulate TikTok, YouTube and Instagram? This is a big issue, especially for young boys and girls.

[Tiana Sharifi]

Absolutely. That's a very loaded question.

In an ideal world, we wouldn't have platforms for individuals like Andrew Tate, who has normalized e-pimping, or the platform OnlyFans. I think that, practically speaking, you can't censor these platforms. Kids will find a way around it, even in countries where they've banned social media platforms. Children and youth find different VPNs to get in.

Again, I come back to prevention and the emphasis on that. I think it's even more effective for our government to recognize that a key piece of human trafficking is coercion. This coercion is happening through particular platforms that are normalizing self-exploitation. I believe the numbers we're seeing are actually exponentially higher, because we're seeing a lot of youth and children being groomed into self-exploitation. They are normalizing pimping each other and not defining it as “human trafficking”. Once they turn 18, all of a sudden they're consensual sex workers.

To reroute your question, I don't believe there will ever be true censorship. In an ideal space, of course.... If we could do that, it would be amazing. I think the more important thing to do is to understand the coercion aspect of human trafficking and educating on that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Thanks so much.

We're now going to pass it over to Andréanne Larouche for two and half minutes.

Andréanne, you have the floor.

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Thank you very much, Ms. Sharifi. If I have time, I might come back to you.

Ms. Nagy, I saw you nodding your head on the issue of online violence and I know that this issue was discussed during the two days in Winnipeg. Most of the witnesses, including Ms. MacDonald and Ms. Sarson, mentioned that there has been a change with respect to these crimes and sexual exploitation during the pandemic.

We also know that legislation is currently in the works at Canadian Heritage to address online violence.

What do you think should be included in such legislation to ensure that these crimes are recognized and can be addressed?

[Timea E. Nagy]

Thank you so much.

Again, I'm going back to Tiana's point, we just need a national strategy as far as prevention is concerned. We need to start a campaign, just like we did with non-smoking and seat belts. We need to start educating our children and parents about healthy consent, what is human trafficking and really putting out a national campaign about what human trafficking is, including digital safety, and such.

If you start educating and going directly to the source of who needs to be educated and legislate that and make that a law, such that every single incoming 12-year-old or 13-year-old needs to receive this education, then it's the kids who are going to grow up eventually who are the ones who are going to end this cycle of exploitation, because they're going to know better not to engage in these kinds of conversations online. We just need to give them the tools.

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Ms. Sharifi, you were talking about coercion. In a few seconds, what did you want to say about online violence?