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.