Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have an opportunity to ask a question in this important debate about coming up with a plan to curtail trafficking of women and children at major events like the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver.
We have heard that time is of the essence in regard to planning this kind of campaign, this kind of program, this kind of coordinated approach to dealing with trafficking at the 2010 games. When people are in downtown Vancouver outside the art gallery, they see the big clock, which constantly ticks down to the start of the Olympics, two years from this month. Everyday that comes closer, but the plan does not seem to be in place yet.
We know trafficking is a $32 billion global industry. We know traffickers have incredible resources available to do this terrible work. We also know there is an incredible amount of money and these big international events are a prime site for trafficking and related activities like the sex trade and drug trafficking that go on around them. We have seen differences between approaches that the World Cup in Munich and the Olympic Games in Athens took and the very different results. There was a much more positive result in Munich than there was in Athens.
When we plan these big international events like the Olympics, we always seem slow to put the social problems related with those games at a high priority. We hear constantly that the facilities are coming along well. In Vancouver a lot of the facilities are completed and are being tested and used already, yet some of the social issues related to the games are still not being addressed, issues like housing and the displacement of people caused by the games. That plan is in trouble. We also hear now that there is not a clear plan in place yet for dealing with the trafficking issues around that.
It is very frustrating to see that we can deal with issues of facilities and training our athletes, but the other social problems related to big events like the 2010 Olympic Games seem to be further down the list. When the member for London Fanshawe said that the official in charge of security for the 2010 games really had not even considered the issue of trafficking, I get very worried.
We have also heard from Dr. Benjamin Perrin from the UBC Faculty of Law. He wrote a report on this issue in November. He said:
Canada's already attractive, but primarily it is a transit country to the U.S. The Olympics give traffickers an easy cover story, and the border guards aren't sufficiently trained to identify these people.
Does the member know what measures are being put in place to ensure border guards and other Canadian border officials are getting the training we need immediately to put this in place?