Definitely. As so many before us today have said, it's really meaningfully including people who trade sex and people who are survivors of trafficking in your development of a unanimous definition of trafficking. Again, as Angela was saying, this overbroad definition that's including multiple types of violence outside trafficking is what's informing our current systems, and that's unreliable data. I think it is important to recognize that this has been finally recognized at a federal level.
When we look at the national action plan and gender-based violence federal government website, we see that even they are now formally recognizing the lack of disaggregated or reliable data, especially in rural and remote northern communities. A quote, verbatim, from the government's website for NAP says, “The statistics...reflect the national picture, however, instances of [gender-based violence] vary across Canada. There are challenges and gaps in collecting consistent and detailed data”. It continues on to say, “A further challenge is the lack of data to support the use of an intersectional lens, which recognizes that people often experience multiple oppressions due to the combined effects of systemic discrimination”.
It's within reach for the government to dive further into their own recognition of this lack of data and to look at, again, including multiple community partners to ensure that the data moving forward is more reliably informed.