Debates of Oct. 17th, 2005

Criminal Code

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, York West, ON]

Madam Speaker, I am very pleased to join in the debate on Bill C-49 and to see that this is third reading. Hopefully, with the help of everyone in the House, the bill will be passed and quickly pushed into law.

I also would like to congratulate the minister for his hard work on something that is extremely important.

I will be sharing my time, Madam Speaker, with the member for Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca this evening.

The important part of Bill C-49 is the government's commitment to the protection of vulnerable persons and the ongoing strategy to combat human trafficking, something that all of us in the House deplore.

Currently, the Criminal Code does not specifically prohibit trafficking in persons, although a number of offences, including kidnapping, uttering threats and extortion do play a significant role in targeting this crime. Bill C-49 would strengthen this legislation by going beyond the focus on immigration and making trafficking in persons a criminal offence.

Victims are often women and children being forced into the sex industry, but at times also include men, women and children exploited through farm, domestic and other labour opportunities. In some countries, trafficked children may be forced into work as beggars and as child soldiers.

Trafficked persons are often duped into their own new professions, deceived with possible dreams in a rich land, with seemingly legitimate employment contracts or marriages abroad. These vulnerable people are too often fleeing poverty and poor living conditions, only to be enslaved in what they thought was going to be their country of opportunity on their arrival in Canada.

Upon arriving at their destination, many of these individuals are put to work, subject to debt bondage which they can never pay back because it increases on a weekly basis. They can spend years and years trying to repay their bondage to be free. Victims of trafficking are often subjected to physical, sexual and emotional abuse.

Although some are universally recognized as victims, for example children who are exploited through the sex trade, others are often perceived as illegal migrants or criminals, people who should be persecuted and prosecuted. Women trafficked in the sex trade are sometimes seen as simply violating immigration or criminal laws relating to prostitution, rather than looking at the seriousness of the big picture.

Because of these perceptions and because of the threats from traffickers, many victims are reluctant to turn to the police for protection. Those of us who come from large urban centres frequently hear that as a concern that they have. The social stigma of prostitution is also a factor. Women trafficked internationally who are returned to their home countries may be ostracized within their communities and their families, again becoming a victim.

We need to ensure in this legislation that we provide strong criminal and witness protection measures backed by the necessary resources in order to ensure effective prosecutions and the real deterrent against trafficking.

We also need accurate statistics concerning the scope of trafficking at home and abroad, a difficult thing at times to achieve.

Although there are no clear statistics, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police estimate that 600 foreign women and girls are coerced into the sex trade in Canada every year with a promise of a better life. This number would probably rise to approximately 800 if it were to include those trafficked into Canada for other kinds of forced labour. Estimates also indicate that approximately 1,500 to 2, 200 people are trafficked from Canada into the United States every year.

Bill C-49 promises a series of criminal law reforms which will enable us to better address human trafficking. Specifically, it would create the three new indictable Criminal Code offences, providing our law enforcement officials with additional tools to address the full range of behaviour often associated with this terrible crime.

Human trafficking involves the recruitment, transportation, concealing and harbouring of a person in order to exploit the person. The main offence proposed by Bill C-49 would target exactly this behaviour and specifically prohibit it.

This offence would carry a strong penalty, indeed, the strongest penalty our criminal law provides: life imprisonment where the offence involves kidnapping, aggravated assault, aggravated sexual assault or the death of the victim. In all other cases, the penalty would be 14 years' imprisonment. This sends a very strong message that such conduct will not be tolerated in Canada and, in my opinion, rightfully acknowledges the terrible impact this activity has on its victims, their families and society in general.

Bill C-49 also proposes to define exploitation as central to the main offence. This is very important, because we know that the crime of human trafficking is always about exploitation of the victims. Bill C-49, in my opinion, properly defines the most reprehensible aspect of this crime. Whether victims are exploited for forced labour, for sexual services or for human organs or tissue, traffickers exploit the lives and the souls of their victims for profit.

And profit they do. By all accounts, human trafficking is big business, generating an estimated $10 billion annually for its perpetrators. That is why Bill C-49 also proposes to create another offence that would target those who would profit from the exploitation of others. Specifically, it would prohibit anyone from receiving a financial or material benefit knowing that it results from the trafficking of persons. This offence is punishable by up to 10 years' imprisonment.

I support this approach because it specifically addresses one of the primary factors fuelling the demand for this type of labour, that is, the ability to make huge profits from the buying, selling and reselling of human beings. Moreover, it provides law enforcement with an improved ability to get at those who would economically benefit from this crime, those who may not actually engage in the physical act of trafficking in persons but who clearly benefit.

Finally, Bill C-49's proposed third offence would prohibit the withholding or destroying of travel or identity documents in order to commit or facilitate the trafficking of persons. This offence would be punishable by a maximum of five years' imprisonment.

Bill C-49 will help to ensure the protection of society's most vulnerable people. I want to say thanks to all members of the House for supporting it. I again congratulate the minister and the government for moving it forward.

[Joy Smith, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Truly, Madam Speaker, trafficking in human beings is a deplorable crime that needs to be addressed. It is gratifying to see in this House the concern about helping to stop this horrendous crime.

The bill put forward has many merits. However, earlier today we talked about police resources. No matter what bills we have, we need the resources to carry out those bills. We need the political will in terms of judges who give hard sentences to people who traffic and we need the joint police forces that are needed to find these people. Trafficking in persons internationally and nationally is something we have to come down on hard and fast.

Could the member opposite please comment on the issue of the lack of police resources and joint forces units and on taking the resources from the gun registry, the over $1 billion that we talked about today, and putting the resources into police forces?

We can sit here in the House of Commons and talk about stopping trafficking in humans, and we need to do that, but how are we going to put the resources on the street with front line police forces to make sure these criminals are apprehended and this terrible practice of trafficking in human beings, nationally and internationally, is stopped and stopped now?

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, York West, ON]

Madam Speaker, clearly these are issues that we all care very passionately about and want resolved. Bill C-49 is only one part of a multi-faceted approach that the government has taken to deal with the whole issue of crime and how much more closely we can work with international communities. Bill C-49 is one instrument. It is one tool. It is only one part of the fight to eradicate crime and protect the most vulnerable people in our society.

We are going to continue to move forward with a variety of pieces of legislation, working together to ensure the safety of people who live in Canada as well as the safety of people in other countries who clearly want to come to Canada. Some are led to believe that this is the land of luxury for everyone and they simply are brought here to be exploited. Bill C-49 will bring an end to that because we are going to be working closely with the international community on how we can make our laws that much stronger.

[Gary Goodyear, Conservative, Cambridge, ON]

Madam Speaker, I would like to ask the member a question about this bill and some of the multi-faceted approaches to fighting crime that the member talks about.

The member spoke about sex crimes, particularly those involving young women who are lured into the sex trade. I have a question for the member, who is so concerned about sex crimes, the sex trade and this human trafficking issue, and let me say now that the House should be concerned about those things.

If the member is so concerned about the crimes against these people and if her party claims to be so concerned, how could the member and her party possibly not vote for raising the age of consent from 14 to 16 years of age? That is not about puppy love, as we have heard. This is another way in which young women are picked on and abused. How could we not support adding another measure of security for these people?

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, York West, ON]

Madam Speaker, we have already dealt with that issue and have made it very clear where the government stands. We are going to continue to work with all our partners in fighting crime, in how we are going to turn around and protect those who are most vulnerable in society, and in seeing what other things we can do to ensure that we are going after the culprits, not innocent children who are finding themselves in a given situation.

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of National Defence]

Madam Speaker, it is an honour today to speak on this particular bill, which addresses an often under-reported plight, a virus and a cancer that has spread across the world, affecting some of the most underprivileged and vulnerable souls in some of the poorest countries of the world.

The bill is actually one of international leadership, because in addressing the challenge of trying to help prevent trafficking of these people, often into conditions of sexual exploitation, we find that most of the countries involved in it do not have the legislative framework upon which to address the problem. Our government has put together this particular bill in a legislative form that can be used by other countries so they can adopt similar legislation in their countries to address this plight.

In a nutshell, the bill, which I hope will be passed forthwith by all members of the House and all parties, has three primary components.

First, it deals with the aspect of introducing three new indictable offences. The main offence is the trafficking in persons. The bill would prohibit anyone from engaging in specific acts involved in this type of activity. In fact, the penalties would be hardened and increased so that the maximum penalty would be life imprisonment.

The second aspect is a second offence that would prohibit anyone from receiving financial benefits from the trafficking of people. In this case, the maximum penalty is raised to 10 years.

The third offence relations to prohibiting the withholding or destroying of documents, which is an integral part in trapping people in this sad situation.

I want to talk for a moment about the scope of the problem to begin with. The U.S. government estimates that between 600,000 and 800,000 men, women and children are trafficked every single year across borders. This does not take into consideration the large numbers of individuals trafficked within borders. We could add at least another million people in regard to that.

These areas and people involve some of the poorest countries in the world. The economic benefit is about $10 billion. The benefits accrue to those individuals who are often involved in drug trafficking and money laundering and to individuals who are involved in the sex trade, essentially as pimps. They abuse these individuals in a heinous way, with women comprising 80% of the people trapped into this. The bulk of them are under the age of 25. We can see that we are dealing primarily with youth and that 80% of them are females.

The countries involved are some of the poorest countries in the world. I will get to a list of them in a moment. There is something that I wish to say above all else about the trafficking of human beings. It is not the same as migrants. Trafficking in migrants brings people to a country, but then they are free to go.

In this case, in the trafficking of human beings, people are lured to another country, usually with the offer of employment, often to work as au pairs or to work in manufacturing jobs, to work simply so they can provide money for themselves and their families. A lot of them have families in their home countries. They wind up going to a country with the hope of work, arranged beforehand, and meet people who promise them work, but then they are taken and often forced to engage in sexual acts. Often what they get in return is abuse and sometimes even death.

Sadly, as I said before, many of the countries in which this happens do not have the legislative framework to deal with these people, or they have the legislative framework but are not willing to actually implement legislation. This is a profoundly sad and tragic thing.

The most vulnerable people are the young and those who come from poor countries. They are often used as cheap labour. I received from an international database information about the countries that are most affected. They are as follows: Moldova, Romania, Mali, Ukraine, Belarus, Bulgaria, Uzbekistan, Colombia and Kyrgyzstan. We can see that what ties together all those countries is the fact that they are extremely poor.

Essentially, those exploiting these individuals are exploiting people who are simply trying to find a place where they can work and provide for themselves. Instead, they often are met with circumstances that can be truly horrific. In fact, today's trafficking of people is really another form of slavery.

A risk factor we see primarily is poverty at home. Children are often affected, but it is often an under-reported and under-documented group. The traffickers often know the families, at least at arm's length. They find a vulnerable group. They convince the families to give up their loved ones, who are often children, saying that the children will work for the financial benefit of the families. The families may not see their children perhaps ever again, because those children were drawn into the sex trade and were forced to engage in sexual activity against their will.

In addressing the problem, a large number of protocols can be used. These include the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the optional protocol on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography, and the Slavery Convention of 1926 to name just a few. The international framework is there. The legislative framework is there internationally, but what it lacks is teeth. As a government we have put teeth into domestic legislation that can be applied here at home in order to go after the pimps and the people attached to organized crime who often are the ones who profiteer from the vulnerabilities of the poor. I hope that we will be able to export this knowledge and this legislative framework abroad. We need more though.

We have to work together and with other countries to develop a framework of knowledge and the sharing of information. We must do a better job of assessing vulnerable groups that we are not too aware of, such as children. We also have to look at different regions. For example, in West Africa slavery and the exploitation of people are widespread. Some 200,000 children in West Africa alone are trafficked in this fashion. They largely go unreported, unrecognized and forgotten. The fate that awaits them is often truly horrific.

Some work is being done. The Organization of American States, the UN and UNICEF have all done some very good work in this area, but there is much more internationally that could be done. There are a few complementary solutions that might be helpful.

One is to have better cross-border collaboration. We as a government are working very strongly with other countries to push this. At the Organization of American States, with the U.S. south of the border and with European countries, Canadian law enforcement officials are working very hard to help coordinate this type of activity.

Model legislation has been seen in other countries. Again, using the Canadian model, this bill, as an example for other countries to adopt would be useful in trying to help other countries adopt the legislative framework.

Minimum standards of health care would also be required. When the people who have been sold as slaves are found, they need access to proper health care. Particularly if they have been involved in the sex trade, they bring back to their country of origin a host of medical problems which sometimes they pass on. An example would be HIV-AIDS. In eastern Europe and southern Africa HIV-AIDS is a terrible problem that is ripping through entire societies. It is sad that people who are trafficked into these environments, who are forced to engage in sex slavery, sadly and tragically have a death sentence because they pick up the HIV virus.

Capacity building of NGOs and law enforcement officials is also required for them to be able to identify the vulnerable groups, identify the people involved in trafficking, and apprehend the individuals involved in the trafficking, but also separate and identify those individuals who have been sold into the sex trade. Telephone hotlines would help, as would witness protection programs for those involved.

I want to close by saying that the trafficking of individuals is a human catastrophe. Our government has put forward this landmark bill. I hope it will be adopted by other countries. I hope that in addressing this profoundly tragic international humanitarian catastrophe, it will bring it to an end.

[Joy Smith, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Madam Speaker, we in the House of Commons have all agreed that human trafficking has to be stopped.

A few short days ago we had a vote in the House where members opposite refused to support raising the age of sexual consent. A child in Canada at 14 years of age right now can legally have sex with an adult. Even part of the Criminal Code states that if the child turned out to be 12 years of age and the perpetrator thought the child was 14, the perpetrator could still get off the hook.

How can we talk about being serious about stopping this horrendous trafficking of human beings, when in the House the members opposite would not even agree to raise the age of sexual consent from 14 to 16 years of age?

This is a travesty in Canada. It just does not wash. We need the police resources and we need the laws to make sure that the bill is implemented in the way it should be implemented.

Could the member comment on that, please?

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Madam Speaker, all of us share the hon. member's concern which is how to protect children from sexual exploitation. That is the nub of the matter.

The question the member is really posing is whether raising the age of consent from 14 to 16 would actually protect children in that vulnerable age group. It may seem on the surface that it would do the trick, but in fact it would not. The member cited the example of a 14 year old having sex with an adult. That is called pedophilia and that is illegal.

I would strongly recommend that the member look at the initiatives the Minister of Justice has put forth to actually strengthen the protection of children, not just between the ages of 14 and 16, but between the ages of 14 and 18. The initiatives the Minister of Justice has put forth go a lot further than actually raising the age of consent from 14 to 16. I think that is the issue we should be grappling with.

I have to confess that I looked at this very closely. It sounds on the surface that it might do a good job. However, it would criminalize a 15 year old having sexual relations with a 17 year old and we do not want to do that. We want to make sure that children, not just from 14 to 16 years, but children from 14 to 18 years are protected.

The range of measures and initiatives the Minister of Justice has implemented will protect children from 14 to 18 years from exactly the type of abuse and sexual exploitation that the member is referring to, and which all members of the House find reprehensible.

[Gurmant Grewal, Conservative, Newton—North Delta, BC]

Madam Speaker, I wanted to participate in the questions and comments but I was not recognized even though I stood five or six times to ask a question of the Liberals. However, I am pleased to rise on behalf of the constituents of Newton—North Delta to participate in the third reading debate on Bill C-49, an act to amend the Criminal Code in respect to trafficking in persons.

The proposed amendments would create a few new indictable offences to specifically address human trafficking.

The first offence, trafficking in persons, prohibits a person from engaging in specified acts for the purpose of exploiting or facilitating the exploitation of another person. This offence would carry a maximum penalty of life imprisonment where it involved kidnapping, aggravated assault, sexual assault, or even death.

The second offence would prohibit anyone from receiving financial or other material benefits resulting from the commission of a trafficking offence. It would be punishable by a maximum penalty of 10 years in jail.

The third offence would prohibit the holding or destroying of documents, such as identification or travel documents, for the purpose of committing or facilitating the commission of a trafficking offence. It would carry a maximum penalty of five years' imprisonment.

Human trafficking is a growing problem that demands urgent and substantial action from the government, which we have not seen for the last 12 years.

According to the United Nations, over 2.4 million people, the vast majority of them women and children, are victimized each year. Human trafficking is now the third largest illegal trade in the world behind weapons and drugs. The penalties have been minimal so this trade has been growing. With annual profits of close to $12 billion on average, organized crime has moved into the trade and has become a dominant force.

Canada is not immune to human trafficking and in fact has been identified as a major transit point and destination for human trafficking. Last year the RCMP estimated that at least 800 people are trafficked into Canada annually, and that an additional 1,500 to 2,200 people are trafficked through Canada into the United States. Some experts believe that the actual numbers are much higher, but the nature of the crime makes it impossible to say definitively how many people are involved. We can say, however, that it is a serious problem.

One of the major root causes has been ignored in the debate that I have listened to today, and that is that the immigration system in this country is in a mess. There are long delays. There is a long queue of people waiting. Some of these people have been waiting for up to eight years to be interviewed and have their cases processed.

For example, in the independent category, in some countries the waiting period is 66 months before someone can be first interviewed. Married couples are separated for a long time before they are reunited. Similarly, parents and other family members have to wait a long time. Visitor visa cases are not being dealt with properly.

The system is being abused. I am not saying the system encourages human trafficking, but why are we letting this happen? It is occurring because the system itself is flawed and is not working the way it should. As a result, the system is vulnerable to abuse because the front door of our immigration policy is not open and therefore people are coming in through the back door. The Liberal government has made promises to address the problem, but for the last 12 years it has not been able to keep any of them.

I would say that these legitimate people, who the system was meant for, are given the run around, are not allowed to come through the proper channels and are being abused by those people.

My province of British Columbia is particularly vulnerable to human trafficking. The United States state department identifies British Columbia as an attractive centre for East Asian traffickers who smuggle South Korean woman through Canada to the United States. Organized crime groups have targeted Vancouver because of our immigration laws, benefits available to immigrants and the proximity to the United States border.

According to the state department, at least 15,000 Chinese entered Canada illegally over the last decade, many of them paying thousands of dollars to smugglers only to end up working as indentured servants or even as prostitutes. Asian women and girls who are smuggled into the country are forced into prostitution regularly. Traffickers use intimidation and violence, as well as the illegal immigrant's inability to speak English, to keep victims from running away or informing the police.

Bill C-49 is not entering into a legislative vacuum. In June 2002, a specific offence against human trafficking came into force under section 118 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. The current law provides for fines of up to $1 million and life imprisonment. Section 118, however, deals with human trafficking across our international border from a border integrity angle.

In contrast, Bill C-49 would deal with trafficking both within Canada and across Canadian borders. Although anti-trafficking legislation has been in place for three years, the first ever charge under the law did not occur until this past April. A Vancouver businessman faces human trafficking charges after police answered a call about a violent incident at the businessman's massage parlour. One charge in three years is a rather meagre result.

Detective Constable Jim Fisher, with the Vancouver police intelligence section, confesses that Canada has not come to grips with what it takes to properly police this human trafficking that has been happening for so long. We can have the best laws in the world but if we do not place enough resources into enforcement the laws will mean nothing. That is the case with human trafficking. Our enforcement of the current law is weak, as demonstrated by this one charge.

Canada is struggling to identify its trafficking victims inside secret migrant smuggling operations.

We will remember that the Auditor General's report seriously criticized this particular instance: 36,000 illegal entrants into this country are missing in action and cannot be traced; and 60% of the people who come to our ports and apply for refugee status go before our refugee officers without any documents and no identification but we all know that when they boarded their plane for Canada they had some sort of document. However once they land in Canada and appear in the lineup applying for refugee status they have no documents.

We must use anti-trafficking laws to vigorously increase investigations, arrests, prosecutions and convictions of traffickers. However that will not happen with the government which insists on starving our law enforcement agencies of the resources they need to do their jobs effectively.

As a member of the Subcommittee on Organized Crime, as well as a member of the citizenship and immigration committee in the past, I became familiar with many of the problems facing our country. It has become clear to me that the Liberal policies are undermining the credibility of the criminal justice system. The government has given us a system in which even soft sentences are only partly served and that fails to protect citizens from crime.

The human trafficking aspect is a lose-lose situation for everyone except the human traffickers who are making a profit. It is bad for our country, bad for our society, bad for our communities and bad for newcomers who could have used the front door rather than using the back door and paying huge amounts to the snakeheads or to the human smugglers.

Who is responsible? The weak laws that are not being enforced by the government.

The recommendations of my colleagues and myself on the committee were essential for tackling organized crime but were ignored by the government and are gathering dust somewhere on a bureaucrat's desk.

The Liberal government has had 12 years to deal with this issue and it has failed. It is the Liberal record of all talk but no action that has put us in this abysmal situation. It is essential that we have tough laws. We need to give the police and law enforcement agencies what they need to carry out their jobs.

The amendments contained in Bill C-49 are comparable to laws passed recently in other jurisdictions.

In July 2004, the United Kingdom passed a new law clamping down on traffickers by introducing a new offence of human trafficking for non-sexual exploitation with a maximum penalty of 14 years and making the offence of knowingly employing an illegal worker a “triable either way” offence subject to unlimited fines.

In 2000, the U.S. Congress passed the trafficking victims protection act which, among other things, created new laws that criminalized trafficking with respect to slavery, involuntary servitude, peonage or forced labour, and increased prison terms for all slavery violations from 10 to 20 years and added life imprisonment where the violation involves the death, kidnapping or sexual abuse of the victim.

In this situation, the victims need protection from the government. Our laws should be such that they should prevent these things from happening, there should be enough deterrents in place and there should be enough resources for the law enforcement agencies to carry on with their jobs but, at the same time, the victims must be protected so that we are fair to all aspects of the law.

Surveying the international scene, it is clear that the time is ripe for tough new human trafficking legislation.

Trafficking in persons has been described as a modern form of slavery. It is a serious human rights violation and is the fastest growing form of transnational organized crime. The profits are huge and the penalities are minimum. It is imperative that Canada acts to stem the growth of this serious crime.

I therefore welcome Bill C-49. It is a small step in the right direction. The bill would bring Canada into line with the international commitments. The bill would address a serious global issue. However the government must not sit on its laurels. Without serious penalties for these serious crimes, the exploitation and abuse will continue.

Bill C-49 speaks of tough maximum sentences. The serious problem with the government is that it talks about tougher maximum penalties but it means nothing because the judicial system, the lawyers, will never hand out those penalties.

Bill C-49 says nothing about mandatory minimum sentences. We need mandatory minimum prison sentences so that those who violate the Criminal Code should be behind bars, should suffer, or at least serve some time and minimum penalties should be imposed.

As we have seen with this existing law, the resources must be available to enforce the law. Only then will Canada be able to start to effectively stamp out human trafficking in this country.

As a nation, it is our responsibility to seek a solution to this problem in order to protect the human rights of all people, from all backgrounds, no matter what their nationality might be.

As lawmakers in this country, it is our responsibility to clean up the system which the government has failed to do for the last 12 years. Our immigration system should be our economic backbone, as well as supporting growth in this country. The immigration system is supporting the manpower needs and the skilled labour that we need. The system is so polluted that it is working only for the human traffickers and not for the legitimate immigrants who want to come to this country and make significant contributions in many ways.

The question of the recognition of foreign credentials did not come to the floor of this House until I brought forward a motion many years ago which the Liberals failed to support. We have qualified people coming to this country to serve, contribute and make positive economic contributions in socio-cultural ways but instead are being employed in menial jobs. Would we expect someone with a Ph.D. or another degree to work at a gas station or drive a taxi? We allow loopholes in the system that have not been taken care of in the past.

On the weekend I attended a wedding reception. Many of the guests who were supposed to join the family on that auspicious occasion could not get their visitor visas. When we inquired about the situation we found out that there were bogus reasons. No legitimate reasons were given and even the income of the sponsors was not properly entered into the system. Some zeros were missing in the income figures. Naturally, the arbitrary criteria did not allow the respectable family members to join the celebration.

We hear similar stories from members of Parliament from all parties. They hear these stories when it comes to funerals.

What do those people do when they are barred from attending family events? They naturally will find some other means to come to this country, such as abuse their ministerial permit or use political influence.

Bill C-49 is a step in the right direction. All the law enforcement agencies must be given enough resources. The laws should be tougher so that we can curtail the violations to the system and the abuse of the system, but on the other hand open the front door to immigration so that legitimate people can come through the front door.

I remember an interesting story. When I was a member of the immigration committee I mentioned this concept of the front door and back door. I said that the back door was closed long ago. When the former minister of immigration was speaking to Bill C-11 in the House at that time, she looked at me and said that the bill would close the back door but that it would open the front door. Neither the front door nor the back door is open now. Instead, the government has installed a revolving door.

I urge the government during the short time it will be in office to clean up the system. The government needs to do whatever can be done to make the immigration system work and stop human trafficking forever.

[Joy Smith, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Madam Speaker, the hon. member has given many insightful comments in terms of immigration.

Here in the House of Commons we are the highest court and this is where the laws are made. We have the power to implement those laws. We have all recognized that the bill has a lot of merit and we all recognize that human trafficking has to stop.

In my view, it is a question of credibility. This year, when we tried to raise the age of sexual consent from 14 to 16, it was defeated. There are many excuses for why it was defeated.

We also heard in this House that the gun registry, which has eaten up more than a billion dollars, is continuing but the money is not being put into the much needed police resources.

Earlier on in the year we had immigrants jumping the queue. We found out that people in the sex trade had preferential treatment on at least one occasion, if not more.

Would the member please comment on the immigration side of this? We have migrants, the most vulnerable people, coming from abroad hoping to have a new life, hoping to have an opportunity to become educated and better themselves. Would the member please comment on the credibility of the Liberal government on Bill C-49?

[Gurmant Grewal, Conservative, Newton—North Delta, BC]

Madam Speaker, I knocked on a lot of doors during the summer break and I heard the question consistently. People do not trust this government any more. They think the government is adrift and going in the wrong direction.

The criminal justice system protects the criminals but not the victims. It fails to protect our children to the extent that when a motion and a bill was presented in the House recently, all Liberals shamelessly stood to oppose the bill for the age of consent to be raised from 14 to at least 16. They did not do it, so what do I conclude? The government lacks the political will. It is out of focus, tired and has become arrogant. It does not have the steam any more to address some of these issues.

Naturally when Canadians look at these things, they find the government is not credible on this issue. An example is Bill C-49. After 12 years, the government came up with this bill.

We will remember a few years ago when a lot of illegal Chinese immigrants or entrants into the country landed on our shores. What did the government do? It did absolutely nothing. The victims who landed on our shores paid huge amounts of money to snakeheads in two provinces in China. The parliamentary secretary at that time went to China and visited those two provinces. The government wanted to solve the problem over there, but did absolutely nothing within its own power to make effective laws in Canada and provide enough resources to law enforcement agencies.

This is the knee-jerk approach of the government. It is too little too late. It came up with Bill C-49 when it noticed that our allies in other countries, the United States and Great Britain, had came up with legislation. It has done this to catch up with the other countries, but it has not made effective laws in our country to protect Canadians.

[Borys Wrzesnewskyj, Liberal, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

Madam Speaker, I thank the member opposite for his support for Bill C-49 and his great concern for human trafficking. He also has a private member's bill, Bill C-283, which proposes bonds for people wishing to come to Canada. With his new found interest in human trafficking and support for this bill, I am curious whether he would consider withdrawing his private member's bill.

As many analysts have said when they have looked at the details of the private member's bill, in the best case scenario bonds posted for people wishing to come to Canada would limit visitors to those who are very rich or have very well off families. In the worst case scenario, there are many potential visitors from countries where, unfortunately, circumstances are such that these source countries have large numbers of people willing to take risks and perhaps to take on loans required to pay for these kinds of bonds.

The illegal trafficking in human beings and women in particular is a multi-billion dollar business, a business that can provide financing in these poor countries to people who perhaps would not otherwise have a way of coming to Canada. Analysts are saying this and logic seems to say that this kind of bill would allow and help in the trafficking of human beings, particularly women.

With his support for Bill C-49, will he be withdrawing his private member's bill?

[Gurmant Grewal, Conservative, Newton—North Delta, BC]

Madam Speaker, I thank the member for at least remembering I have a bill in the House which would solve the problems that the Liberals created with visitors' visas. My bill has tremendous support across the country, in all provinces and in all segments of the population. In fact all parties in the House have members who support my bill. That is why the bill has passed from this House and has gone to the committee. It is a good bill.

The problem and the tragedy are that the Liberals sometimes have difficulty understanding that their minds are working on only the wrong side of the equation. Let me put it this way. If we looked seriously and carefully at the bill, we would see that it would curtail human trafficking. Why? Because legitimate people who are not allowed to come to Canada based on arbitrary excuses would at least have the front door opened for them to come to Canada. We would monitor that front door and they would enter into Canada legitimately and then leave.

On the other hand, the political involvement in the visitor's visa process has further muddied this issue. We have asked many times, and I again ask the Liberal members, if they can table in the House how many minister's permits have been issued to members of Parliament from all parties. We will find out that it is the Liberal members who have been given the most minister's permits on a per member basis, not the opposition members. They are abusing the system by politicizing it. If the system is fair, there should be a homogeneous distribution of minister's permits in the House, and I challenge that this is not the case.

I came up with a positive solution to put a deterrent in place so that wrongful people would not abuse the system, but rightful people, such as close family members who wanted to attend a marriage ceremony or a funeral, could come to Canada.

[Hedy Fry, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to stand in the House today to support Bill C-49 and to echo some of the strong support from members on all sides of the House for the bill.

In 1997 I attended, on behalf of the Government of Canada, the first World Conference on the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children and Youth in Stockholm, Sweden. What I heard was appalling. It was the place where work began to be formalized for dealing in the trafficking in women and children. Since then, it has become a cause for me. It is something about which I feel passionate. I have worked closely with my colleagues over the years to bring us to the point where we have now many policies and pieces of legislation. We are working internationally with the United Nations and other countries to deal with trafficking.

For me the bill is one more piece in that armamentarium of all the tools that we can use to deal with trafficking.

The United States Department of State in its 2004 annual report stated that 600,000 to 800,000 persons are trafficked around the world each year; 47% of those are women and 50% are children. We do not have to be a mathematician to know that that makes up 97% of the total people being trafficked around the world.

UNICEF estimates that about 2.1 million children are trafficked each year and that it is worth $10 billion to organized crime.

Trafficking in human beings is not something is new. It is as old as time. Those of us who have read history know about slavery in ancient Rome. We also know about the 60 million Africans who were trafficked as slaves during the colonial era. We know that trafficking has been with us for a long time. It does not make it acceptable however.

Yet today trafficking is carried out in a very different series of ways than we used to read about in history. The new realities of different types of trafficking is reflected in this bill which is very important. We have to use new tools to deal with modern day problems.

The reality today is that victims can be trafficked through many different means: by being kidnapped, by being lured, by being given false promises of legitimate jobs or by being given false promises of all kinds of opportunity to people who are desperate and wanting to find some way out of the hopelessness of their lives.

The bill also reflects the reality that persons can be trafficked for different purposes: for being forced into the sex trade, for being forced into some form of labour whether it be in sweat shops or otherwise, or horrendously to have to donate a human organ or human tissue as part of what they are trafficked to do.

The bill reflects a reality that no one can ever validly consent to this kind of dehumanization.

At the same time Bill C-49 reflects the reality that human trafficking can involve global dimensions and local dimensions. Trafficking can occur within one country either from rural to urban, urban to rural areas or region to region. We know that it goes on in Canada.

Ultimately it does not really matter what form of conduct it involves or to what purpose the trafficking occurs. Bill C-49 has proposed a package of criminal law reforms that will deal with many of those new ways of trafficking.

This is tough legislation. I know some people do not think it is tough enough, but it is. It is tough enough hopefully to prevent trafficking. It is tough enough to protect the vulnerable victims. It is tough enough to prosecute offenders whether local or international and to make them fully and completely accountable.

However, that is not all. Bill C-49 is only one part of an array of tools, policies and legislation to protect the vulnerable in our society which is a priority for our government. For instance it links with Bill C-2 which was passed in July of this year and it builds on, IRPA, the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, to protect persons who may be trafficked as refugees. It builds on our existing Criminal Code protections against behaviours associated with trafficking, by creating three new indictable offences.

The first, trafficking in persons, is a specific prohibition against any person engaged in the exploitation of a person or facilitating the exploitation of a person. This new proposal identifies the acts in question such as recruiting, transporting, transferring, receiving, holding, concealing or harbouring a person, exercising control, and direction or influence over the movements of another person. That is a pretty broad definition. That includes all of the many different players. It does not only include the person who started the movement from country A but it could also be the person who played a role somewhere along the chain of events. They too would be indicted under this bill.

This legislation expands the definition of our criminal law responses. For example, the Criminal Code offence against kidnapping is also expanded in this particular bill. With this new offence, it is proposed that the maximum penalty for any of the trafficking to be life imprisonment if it involves the kidnapping, aggravated assault or aggravated sexual assault or death of the victim, and 14 years imprisonment in other cases.

These maximum sentences send a strong message that this government denounces and deters this kind of criminal conduct. If it were to pass with the agreement of other members of the House, it would send a strong message that the Parliament of Canada denounces and deters this kind of criminal conduct.

The second part of the bill that I like is the proposal to create another indictable offence specifically targeting those who seek to profit from human trafficking and from the exploitation of others, even if they do not engage in the physical acts set out in the main trafficking in persons section. It would specifically prohibit any person from receiving a financial or other material benefit when they know that it results from the commission of the trafficking of another person. That offence would carry a maximum penalty of 10 years imprisonment.

The third part of the bill also sends a strong message. This legislation would create another new offence to prohibit anyone from concealing, removing, withholding or destroying another person's travel documents or identification.

[John McCallum, Liberal, Minister of National Revenue]

Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I informed the House during question period that the audit report concerning Mr. Dingwall would be released this Wednesday. However, having just spoken to the offices of the Mint, I am now informed that this will not be possible. The date of the release will instead be October 26.

[Hedy Fry, Liberal, Vancouver Centre, BC]

Madam Speaker, the offence of removing, withholding or destroying a person's travel documents, identification or immigration documents for the purpose of committing or facilitating the trafficking of that person carries a maximum penalty of five years imprisonment. If we add to that the consequential amendments that adds a new trafficking in persons offence to the existing DNA databank in Canada, to the sex offender registry provisions, and to all the wiretap provisions that facilitate police investigations, we have covered a whole enormous range of areas in which there could have been loopholes.

I am especially pleased with the bill which improves the proposed offences over the clear definition of exploitation for the purposes of human trafficking. Under the proposed offences, individuals are exploited where they are forced, out of fear for their own safety or that of someone known to them such as a family member, to provide labour, a service, such as sexual services or an organ/tissue.

We know that there are stories of people who have been trafficked here who have been terrified to speak out because their families back home were threatened or they believe that someone back home would be hurt if they ever spoke out. This takes care of that component.

At the very core of trafficking is the exploitation of victims and I think all members in the House would agree to this aspect which makes this particular conduct so morally repugnant to all of us here. Furthermore, in a case where everyone has said that victims have consented to come because someone paid their way and they signed some sort of bogus document, that we know is never valid because it exploits the fear and the need of a person to leave or to come to another country.

Status of Women Canada did a survey I recall when I was the secretary of state which talked about women who came to Canada specifically to work at promised legal jobs only to find themselves forced into prostitution. Sadly, these women were so desperate to leave the terrible conditions back home that a majority of the women in the survey responded that they would rather stay in prostitution rather than go back home because going back home left them with absolutely no hope. This is not consent. It is exploitation of human misery, human poverty and human fear, and we have to abhor that as a Parliament.

I am also on the solicitation subcommittee of the justice committee. We heard from women who are at greatest risk, Canadian women who are exploited and trafficked within Canada, who are moved out of rural areas into cities, who are moved out of reservations into cities, and who are moved around the country, especially young people. They are afraid, terrified sometimes, to go back home but also being trafficked because of their fear, because of their poverty, and exploited because of their addiction to substances. We know that there must be zero tolerance for that kind of trafficking of human beings into prostitution in this country.

We know of young people, children and youth, who are trafficked and exploited for commercial sexual favours on the Internet. We must also have zero tolerance toward those who exploit our children and youth.

This brings me full circle to where I initially talked about going to Sweden to talk at the first world conference against the commercial sexual exploitation of children and youth. This brings us right back to where we started and it kind of makes a circle of Canada's very beginnings on this issue and how Canada has since begun to work with the United Nations to build bridges with other countries and to sign on to the United Nations convention against trafficking and the United Nations conventions against prostitution and pornography, so that working together with other countries we can stop organized crime who are better organized than we are and who have been so successful at doing this.

I am very proud of this bill because it strengthens Canada's contribution to the global efforts, one that is already very strong and it also deals with the terrible problem of trafficking in vulnerable persons here in Canada.

[Rob Anders, Conservative, Calgary West, AB]

Madam Speaker, we hear a lot of talk about how this bill is getting tough. Why is it not as tough as the U.K. and the United States? If somebody violates the law in the U.K., there are unlimited fines. I do not see any mention of fines here in this bill. I would think that Canada should be just as tough as the United Kingdom when it comes to fines. In the United States, instead of putting in penalties like Canada has here of 5 or 10 years, the Americans are talking about 20 years imprisonment.

Why is Canada not as tough as the U.K. and the United States on traffickers? Why does the bill have such a light touch on human traffickers as compared to those jurisdictions?

[Hedy Fry, Liberal, Vancouver Centre, BC]

Madam Speaker, this bill is very consistent with what is being done in the United States at this point in time and its legislation. The hon. member talked about 20 years as being tough. Life imprisonment is pretty tough as far as I am concerned.

[Rob Anders, Conservative, Calgary West, AB]

Yes, that is right, but we do not have it.

[Hedy Fry, Liberal, Vancouver Centre, BC]

Madam Speaker, perhaps the hon. member would allow me to answer the question he asked. Did he really ask a question or was he merely being rhetorical? I would like to answer the question, so I would like the member to allow me to do so.

[Rob Anders, Conservative, Calgary West, AB]

Life is not in Canada. It is in the U.S.

[Hedy Fry, Liberal, Vancouver Centre, BC]

Madam Speaker, the member had the opportunity to ask his question. The hon. member speaks of fines in the U.K. If human trafficking is run by organized crime and it is a $10 billion industry, tell me what fines will do. Imprisonment is better than fines for people like that, so I think this bill is very tough.

[Rob Anders, Conservative, Calgary West, AB]

Then let us use life imprisonment.

[Hedy Fry, Liberal, Vancouver Centre, BC]

The member should learn some manners next time.

[The Acting Speaker (Hon. Jean Augustine)]

It being 6:30, pursuant to order made earlier today, the motion for third reading stage of Bill C-49 is deemed carried.

(Motion agreed to, bill read the third time and passed)

A motion to adjourn the House under Standing Order 38 deemed to have been moved.