Status of Women Committee on May 4th, 2023

[Shelley Walker]

I think some of that training will, but you have to understand that we don't have a lot of room to carry a safe bag, and if I am a driver who crosses borders, some things are restricted on the U.S. side, so we have to really look at everything.

I think more education and awareness are what's needed in the trucking industry to help improve things. It will make a difference.

[Anna Roberts, Conservative, King—Vaughan, ON]

If we are going to train the truckers to identify individuals who are trafficked, what is it that they do when they identify someone? Do they call the police? How do they deal with it?

[Shelley Walker]

I can tell you that Timea Nagy is the one who designed our online training course for professional drivers. One of the main things she stresses is that if they see somebody in imminent danger, they're to call 911, and after that, it's The Canadian Centre to End Human Trafficking.

[Anna Roberts, Conservative, King—Vaughan, ON]

Thank you for that.

I am going to ask a question of Kathy from Stats Canada.

The statement you made was that in 2019 the feds put out an action plan, but it is difficult to collect the information.

How can we, as a team, make recommendations if we don't hear what the victims have explained once they are arrested? We could learn, ourselves, in order to put recommendations into the report. How can we get that information?

[Kathy AuCoin]

That's a great question.

The data that we use comes from police-reported information management systems. If I look at the trend data from 2011 to 2017, there were year-over-year increases in the number of police-reported incidents. In 2018-9, there were really high numbers, and in 2020-21, it kind of flatlined.

To get the narrative, the story, the experiences from survivors would have been a qualitative study. There is some very good qualitative research in which there were one-on-one interviews with survivors of human trafficking. From a statistical perspective, though, what we always have to grapple with, and what we are asked often, is the overall prevalence. How big is that problem?

When we have victims who are scared for their lives, who are concerned about their families, their friends, and scared about being abused if they go to the police, capturing the data from the police will always be just the tip of the iceberg. Any agency or victim service that is capturing information could help us understand the bigger picture.

However, as Ms. Walker said, funding for victim services is all over the map. Do they have the resources and the staffing to collect information? Then, from a comparability perspective, with so many frontline services available, how do you harvest all of that information to give us the big picture?

From Statistics Canada's perspective, we rely on the police-reported data. We get data from some shelters. We're working now with the Canadian hotline to look at their data so we can make a nicer picture to explain what we think is going on.

[Anna Roberts, Conservative, King—Vaughan, ON]

Can you get that data to us? Is that possible?

[Kathy AuCoin]

I can send you the information about the shelters.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Yes. We'll make a list for you, Kathy, because I'm sure there will be a few things we want to get on there.

I am going to pass it over to Anita now for five minutes.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you so much to our witnesses.

I'd like to first ask questions of StatsCan and pick up on some of the previous questions about how you get your data and where you find it.

We've been talking about how we find the numbers, the data, but what about the disaggregated data? For instance, among the x number of women and girls we know are trafficked, how many of them are newcomers? What are the ages? What are their backgrounds? I am wondering whether there is there an ability to get that kind of data.

[Kathy AuCoin]

That's a critical question.

What we can release at the moment are age and sex. We are unable to release ethnicity, which is a huge gap. However, currently Statistics Canada, working in association with the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, will start collecting ethnicity data.

That will fill a key gap. I'm thinking about across borders and whether there are indigenous women. We'll be able to capture that information moving forward.

We don't have immigrant status, but we have the ability to link our police-reported data to other datasets within Statistics Canada. We're hopeful that in the coming years, we'll be able to get a sense of whether someone is a new immigrant or what their status is. That's something we will be working on.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Much of what we heard in our study is that indigenous women and girls are overrepresented and that foreign students are being recruited. I think it would be quite key to be able to get that information.

Related to that, you just mentioned that the police are providing you with some of this data. How well are you able to gather data from provinces, from police services? What are your sources? Are there any areas where you're having difficulty getting data that might have been collected?

[Kathy AuCoin]

Through our Uniform Crime Reporting Survey, we extract information from more than 600 police services across Canada. We get the data in a consistent manner. It's high quality.

The challenge we currently have is that anecdotally we know that some police services are taking a trauma-informed approach in dealing with human trafficking victims and may not categorize an incident as human trafficking because the victim doesn't want to press charges and the police are following their lead. Also, they might be informed by the Crown that they need to lay a charge of something else in order to get this case moving through the system. There are some instances of this happening, and therefore we are currently having additional conversations with some police services to say, “Could we be coding it some way? How can we capture some of the information you are gathering? We know you're doing good work with some victims, but we're not getting all of that information.”

Some of those conversations are ongoing, and if there are opportunities to exploit data from these agencies, we will try to resolve this.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

I imagine that confidentiality and privacy are probably real concerns there.

We've heard the same thing, that very often the police will charge based on the drugs they find there or on other offences, and not necessarily on the trafficking offence. Also, one of the things we've heard is that there is so much more to trafficking than the criminality. It's a continuum, and so coercion and things like that wouldn't necessarily meet that criminal threshold.

Is there a way to collect any of that kind of data?

[Kathy AuCoin]

Again we have to understand that police officers are trying to gain the trust of victims and that their priority is to safeguard that victim. They have to gain that trust, so if the victim is reluctant to share information about the perpetrator and is feeling threatened, then the priority is to find housing. As Mr. Flynn, a previous witness, said, it might be a week or a month later or the individual may never press a charge. They just want to find a safe place.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

We've heard a lot about online grooming. Is there any way to collect data on what is happening online where these young girls are being groomed, are being exploited?

[Kathy AuCoin]

Currently within our systems we do have a flag that will indicate whether a computer was used in the perpetration of this violent offence. We haven't yet looked at it in terms of human trafficking.

My concern would be that maybe the luring part would start, but once the individual or the young child was being trafficked, then the contact would have been made. It's something we're going to explore.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

That's perfect. Thank you so much.

We're now going to pass it back over to Andréanne Larouche.

Andréanne, go ahead.

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Ms. AuCoin and Ms. Léonard, thank you for being here today.

Ms. Léonard, I'd like to give you an opportunity to finish what you were saying at the end of my first round. I'll ask you to do it in less than a minute, if possible, because I'd like to talk with the other witnesses well.

What could we implement? With the numbers you have, could you make one or two recommendations to better identify human trafficking cases? As we said, there's a difference between reported cases, depending on whether it's human trafficking or other cases of violence in general.

[Lucie Léonard]

As we said, we have to work with all police services and get an official commitment to create a national database. That would lead to establishing comparable standards, processes and information systems. We need to set up a mechanism to facilitate information sharing between different jurisdictions impacted throughout the country. It would allow us to create standards for conducting investigations. We talked about missing persons. It would also ensure that these cases are in fact reported and investigated more closely.

That's what we observed in cases of sexual assault deemed unfounded. By working with police services and organizations that offer services to victims, we reduced the number of sexual assault cases deemed unfounded. The same approach could apply to these cases. If we work with police services and offer better training, we can better understand the situation and deal with it.

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Thank you very much, Ms. Léonard.

Ms. Walker, I participated in a two-day retreat on human trafficking at the Museum for Human Rights, in Winnipeg. Your organization was onsite as an event partner, and I must say it was extraordinary. I was delighted to hear that.

What were your takeaways from those two days? What discussions did you have? What suggestions or proposals stayed with you?

[Shelley Walker]

I was very shocked that it was the same type of conference with the same big corporations discussing the same things that we all know about. I would like to have seen some more workshops or working groups to actually come up with solutions.

I'm a big believer, and I would rather sit there and listen to a survivor than to somebody from a large corporation who is only there to better themselves. I walked away a little disappointed in that event. I was hoping that there would have been more discussion than what there was.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Thanks so much, Shelley.

I'm now going to pass it over to Lindsay. Lindsay, you have two and a half minutes.

[Lindsay Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

I'd like to ask this of the StatsCan witnesses. I've been trying to put something forward, and in our provincial government there's a bill, Bill 99, that they're trying to get through the legislature. Ultimately this would help survivors who are trying to rebuild their lives to get out from under debt that has been collected by human traffickers from those witnesses.

I was wondering if you collect any data or have any information, because we're looking at a way to do this federally as well and to have some legislation federally. One of the groups that's been working on this, Project Recover, says that the federal and provincial governments also get a cut of the debt incurred by human traffickers because of their collection of HST.

Do you have any information on that, or do you collect any information around that debt incurrence and what happens to it?

[Kathy AuCoin]

Statistics Canada does have data on HST that's collected from legal businesses, but even if we knew the entities and their nefarious criminal activities, we would have no way of being able to determine that. When we collect data for HST that's paid or not, it gets aggregated into large data points that are released at the provincial level, rather than on individual entities. That information is not collected through our justice data.

[Lindsay Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

I am looking at data, and it says about $14,000 per year at least. How would that data have been collected if StatsCan isn't looking at it? Is it not officially collected?