Status of Women Committee on May 4th, 2023

[Lucie Léonard, Director, Canadian Centre for Justice and Community Safety Statistics, Statistics Canada]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair and honourable members of the standing committee. I would like to thank you for this opportunity to present our most recent police-reported statistics on human trafficking in Canada.

Most of the information I will be focusing on today is part of the publications that we provided to the clerk for your reference.

It is important to note that the police-reported data that I will be drawing from reflects only those incidents of human trafficking that come to the attention of the police and that we know that many victims, as was mentioned today, are reluctant to report. Therefore, this data underestimates the true scope of human trafficking in Canada. However, we think it monitors this type of crime. This data is available and important to identify overall trends to highlight, again from a police-reported perspective, who is most at risk and where this crime occurs.

Between 2011 and 2021, there were over 3,500 incidents of human trafficking reported by police, involving 2,688 victims. From this data, we know that human trafficking is a form of gender-based violence, with the vast majority of victims being women and girls. Further to that, we also know that one-quarter of the victims are girls—that is, under the age of 18—while, of accused persons, eight in 10 are men and boys.

Nine in 10 victims of police-reported human trafficking knew their trafficker, and one-third of the victims were trafficked by an intimate partner. What we know as well is that the research has shown that traffickers often pose as potential romantic partners to recruit or lure individuals, with the end goal of trafficking them.

While men represented the large majority of adult accused persons, more than half of the youth accused were girls. Female youth, more and more, are perceived as being better positioned to appear trustworthy and thus are tasked with luring other girls. It is important to note that the boundaries between female trafficking victims and offenders are becoming increasingly blurred. Therefore, a high proportion of the female youth accused of trafficking were themselves victims of human trafficking.

From our police-reported data, we are not able to discern whether a human trafficking incident was related to sexual or labour exploitation or both. However, when we explored other related charges within the human trafficking incident, we found that in about 41% of the incidents involving a secondary offence, almost six in 10 were related to a sex trade offence, while one-quarter involved a sexual assault, again highlighting that most of these incidents reported to the police are related to sexual exploitation.

Between 2011 and 2021, the large majority of human trafficking incidents were reported to police in urban areas. More specifically, since 2011 more than four in 10 of these incidents were reported to police in four cities: Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Halifax. Some of these were mentioned as part of this committee.

It is important to note that the differences between one Canadian city and another in terms of the number of victims reported are also likely impacted by regional differences, such as local human trafficking awareness campaigns, specialized training units that we see among police services, and available resources for detecting and reporting human trafficking.

In addition to that, we know that human trafficking is difficult to successfully prosecute. As a result of that, some police services, under the advice of the Crown, may recommend or lay other types of charges to move the cases through the justice system. Therefore, as a result of these charging practices, the overall count of human trafficking victims could be reduced.

Turning now to how these cases are handled in our criminal courts, we looked at some of the data from our integrated criminal court survey over an 11-year period, between 2010-11 and 2020-21, and found that there were around 950 cases involving just under 3,000 trafficking charges. Overall, the number of trafficking charges and cases increased over the period examined, similar to what was mentioned earlier.

According to adult criminal court records, human trafficking cases take longer to complete than do cases involving other violent offences. Specifically, human trafficking cases took a median number of 382 days to complete. This was more than twice as long as for sex trade-related cases and other violent-offence cases.

The data also found that fewer cases of human trafficking charges resulted in guilty decisions. Around one in eight human trafficking cases completed in adult criminal court over the period of the study resulted in a guilty decision for human trafficking charges. In comparison, a guilty decision was much more common for cases with a sex trade charge and cases with a violent offence charge. I'll leave it there.

Thank you, Madam Chair and honourable members of the committee, for your attention. I and my colleague Kathy AuCoin would be happy to answer some of the questions with regard to some of the issues that have been raised and also other work we're doing around increasing this information and, as also mentioned, around missing persons in Canada as well.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

That is fantastic. Thank you so much.

I'd now like to welcome Shelly Walker from the Women's Trucking Federation of Canada.

You have five minutes for your opening comments.

[Shelley Walker, Chief Executive Officer, Women's Trucking Federation of Canada]

Thank you.

My name is Shelly Walker. I'm the founder and chief executive officer of the Women's Trucking Federation of Canada. I would like to thank you for the opportunity to speak here today.

I've been involved with the transportation industry for over 30 years. I started my career as a school bus operator, and for the last 20-plus years I've been a professional driver.

I became aware of human trafficking several years ago and decided I needed to learn more. I reached out to Timea Nagy, an expert in this space, because I wanted to do more within the transportation industry. Through funding from the Ontario Ministry of Transportation, we hired Timea's Cause to create an online survivor-led driver training course for professional drivers. We have also wrapped several 53-foot trailers with the “No Human Trafficking” message. We host a public launch with each trailer. We invite various levels of government, local police, victim services and local organizations to attend and give remarks about the services available in their areas.

We have also championed the Ontario Ministry of Transportation to include human trafficking awareness training in entry-level training. Hopefully, the federal Minister of Transport will also include this in the federal mandate. We would like to see online survivor-led training mandatory for every class of commercial licence. Whether you drive a cab, a school bus or a transportation van, everybody needs to have this training.

Every year at our annual conference, we bring in guests to speak about human trafficking. We want our attendees to learn more about what they can do to help, whether it is helping to spread knowledge or to make financial contributions. Unfortunately, so many Canadians still believe it doesn't happen here in Canada. We believe a solution for this is probably custom-designed mobile educational trailers. With government funding and partnering with survivor-led organizations, we can make a difference. These trailers would have the ability to travel to remote locations to spread education and awareness. Skills Ontario and the Infrastructure Health and Safety Association both use these types of educational trailers and are having great success in their respective areas.

We all have a role to play in fighting to end human trafficking. By working together instead of against each other, we can all make a difference.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Thank you very much.

We'll now begin our six-minute rounds of questioning. We'll start with Anna Roberts.

Anna, you have six minutes.

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

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you very much for appearing today and helping us to better understand how we can make a difference.

Ms. Walker, I understand that you've worked with Timea. We have heard from her. She's very insightful. She provided this committee with a lot of updated information that we need to know in terms of what we need to do.

First, are truckers trained on how to identify potential victims of human traffickers on the road?

[Shelley Walker]

No, they're not.

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

Would you agree that education and training them would help?

[Shelley Walker]

Yes, it would. I think it's very important that drivers learn.

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

I'm just wondering; it's a $150-billion business. I hate to call it that, but I can't think of any other name. If we followed the money and stopped the money, it should stop the human trafficking. Do you agree?

[Shelley Walker]

You know, it might, but I think in reality they'll just find different ways to do it. If we look at the lifespan of criminals, whether they're drug dealers or the Mafia, they've found various ways to legalize their businesses. I think we need to do a lot more than we're currently doing.

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

You've been a professional driver for 20 years. We keep hearing that the human trafficking numbers keep going up and up. The only way we can stop it is to stop the money flow. I really believe that, from speaking to different officers and different individuals.

Would you agree that if the government were to create a registration of all users and perpetrators and have that available for every single truck driver so that if they see these individuals with young girls, they might be more informed to call the police or maybe help them out?

[Shelley Walker]

Yes, I do. I think it would be really important.

If at some point we could create a mobile app that's easily accessible by truck drivers as well as victim service agencies, etc., I think it would make things a lot easier.

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

In your opinion, if we were to seize the assets of all users, all perpetrators—every single asset—and take that money, put it back into the safe homes where we can provide the victims with the services they need to move on and to get away from this, would you think that would stop the flow of human trafficking?

[Shelley Walker]

Yes, I do.

Basically, right now the traffickers do not get enough jail time or any kind of monumental penalty. If we look at how we have done that in other areas, by seizing assets and returning that money, we see that it's a great way to go. It's something the government should have done a long time ago.

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

I also think that maybe we need to look at the fact that their sentences do not meet the crime. Would you agree with that?

[Shelley Walker]

Yes, I totally agree with that.

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

In a sentence of two years, four years, with good behaviour, they're out in six months. We need to let people know that if you're going to commit a crime of human trafficking, you're going to be put in jail for a very long time.

I would ask, then, do you think that truckers across Canada should be mandated to take training in order to help us with that process—you told us that the truckers are probably our eyes and ears—as opposed to just leaving the responsibility to the police departments?

[Shelley Walker]

We travel the main corridors of Canada. The truck stops, the rest areas, are where a lot of this occurs. It's right where we are.

I hate to say it, but drivers commonly refer to these ladies we see wandering around the parking lots as “lot lizards”. They're somebody out there looking to make some money for the night, and they're willing to do anything to do it.

By having this type of training, we can let drivers know that not everyone knocking on their doors is a sex worker—that we have some very young girls who are being trafficked.

I can tell you, in the first year of the human trafficking awareness training that we put online, there were drivers who reached out to us and said, “Oh, my God. I didn't know what I was seeing, but now I know.” We've had drivers who made some calls to 911. We've had drivers make calls down in the U.S.

Yes, I think driver training is important. That's why my organization and I have been very vocal on the need to make it mandatory training. We are very excited that we were able to get that in Ontario on the entry-level side with the truck training schools, so every newly licensed driver in the province of Ontario will have human trafficking awareness training.

I think that's really important.

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

When we were doing our tour across Canada, we went to a few different airports and saw stickers on bathroom walls of women who had been trafficked. I think we should also—I'm going to ask your opinion on this—put the perpetrators and the users up there as well. What do you think of that?

[Shelley Walker]

That's a little out of my scope of expertise, but on a personal level, I am not opposed to that idea.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Thanks very much.

I think we know what Anna is going to take care of. Thank you very much.

Emmanuella is online, and I'm going to pass it to her for six minutes.

[Emmanuella Lambropoulos, Liberal, Saint-Laurent, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair, and I'd like to thank our witnesses for being with us today.

My first question is to Ms. Walker.

First of all, thank you for the initiative you've taken through your work to help women and girls in situations of human trafficking and violence.

I'm curious. I'm not sure that you mentioned it, but I want to have you repeat it if you did already. Is it very common for people in the trucking industry to witness this type of crime? If so, have you ever had any experiences or contacted women in this situation?

I'll let you start with that.

[Shelley Walker]

It's more common than we like. I can tell you as a driver that I have seen it. I have had them knock on my door. When it first started to occur to me, early on in my truck driving career, I was just thinking to myself, “Oh, Lord, not again. Stop knocking on my truck. I need to sleep. I have to get up in three hours and haul a load.” Quite often, as drivers, not knowing any better, we holler at them, “Go away. Get away from my truck.”

Once I took training, then it began to open up my eyes, and I realized what was going on. Then you try to look for signs and to pay attention to where they're going. I know to call 911 regardless of where I am and to try to get help. I can tell you that my experience, not with the Canadian human trafficking hotline but with the U.S. hotline, was being on hold for 30 minutes and still waiting for somebody to answer on the other end to the point where I finally, eventually, gave up.

[Emmanuella Lambropoulos, Liberal, Saint-Laurent, QC]

Thank you.

I know you mentioned that you worked with Timea as well, who has a lot of recommendations. I'm wondering, through your work in this area, if you could recommend anything for our government that could help women safely exit prostitution or sex work if they don't necessarily know that they've been trafficked, or in situations where they have been. Is there something that the government could do to make it easier for women to get the help that they need?

[Shelley Walker]

We could start off with making sure that they have housing, that they have someplace to go and that the proper supports are in place for them. I think we need to help them slowly get back into society. Most of them need counselling based on their culture and their beliefs. That's important.

I often hear from survivors. I do talk to quite a few of them. There are criminal records that follow them, and it really makes it hard for them to have a career. I can tell you that in conversations I've had with the Solicitor General's office in Ontario, the question I always ask them is, “They were a victim and went to jail. Are we now going to continue to victimize them for the rest of their lives by having that criminal record follow them?”

I really think something the federal government needs to look at is what we could do to change that and what we could do to give them the actual clean slate they deserve and don't currently get.