Madam Speaker, I share the sentiments of the last speaker in terms of the work done by the member for Kildonan—St. Paul in bringing forth this issue. It is greatly to her credit that she has over a number of years gathered the information and pressed this issue forward. I know she does not want me to say this but it seems at times that she has done this in spite of her own government and political party.
However, as my colleague from London—Fanshawe said, much more needs to be done. The amendments we passed to the Criminal Code back in 2005 met our requirements of an international protocol but we have seen very little enforcement in that regard.
I want to spend most of my time in this debate on the international situation because it tells us something about what we should be doing in Canada, specifically with regard to this bill. We also need much more activity on the part of the government in other areas, not just under the Criminal Code and in the criminal justice system.
I am referring to a report that came out from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in February. It began looking at human trafficking fairly recently, I would say, starting back about 2003. It wrote a significant report in 2006, three years ago this month, and then this report in February of this year. The executive director has a cover sheet on it and I want to refer to several points that she raised.
The first point is that the number of countries that have been moving to implement the protocol has grown quite substantially. She obviously sees that as a major and positive development. She points out that a number of countries have not, particularly on the continent of Africa where a lot of work needs to be done.
She also raises a point that we need to take some cognizance of. She said that although the number of convictions under the various criminal legislations passed around the world have been increasing, the convictions are mostly taking place in a very small number of countries. Canada falls into those areas of the larger group where we are getting very few convictions because we are getting very few charges.
She points out that in two out of every five countries that have signed onto the protocol, they have not had a single conviction. Again, although we do not fall into that category, we are not much out of it, given the few convictions we have had since we passed the law back in 2005.
She goes on to make a third point that I want to draw to the House's attention. She says that, by far, sexual exploitation is the most commonly identified human trafficking. That was at 79% in the study, followed distantly by forced labour at 18%. She then goes on to say that it is probably not an accurate reflection of what is going on when we take into account a number of other forced labour situations, including youth being used as soldiers in warfare, children begging, put into domestic servitude, forced into marriage and even having organs removed. In the covering letter, she makes the point very strongly that we do not have, as we do in other areas of criminal activity, accurate documentation.
The fourth point is one about which I am most concerned. With regard to this legislation and the role of the legislation already on the books, the majority of people being convicted of crimes of human trafficking are women, not men. This came out for the first time in the report. My initial reaction is okay, if they commit the crime, they should be convicted. However, what it really says is in many countries the crime is being used in a targeted way against women. She makes the point in the report that almost always the women who are convicted were themselves victims of human trafficking initially. They were brought in almost always by organized crime syndicates, moved up the ladder of the organization to a low level of management and forced to recruit other women and children into the sex trade and other forms of human trafficking.
What then happens is they are the ones who get caught in large numbers, so we end up with this figure that more than half of the convicted offenders are women. The reality is they continue to be victimized. They were victims initially when they were dragged or forced into whatever the conduct is in trafficking and then forced to take part in the crime itself on an ongoing basis. They are the ones who are being convicted in the largest numbers. When we look at the bill before us, we have to be cognizant of that fact.
The final point she makes in the summary of the report is that most of the trafficking, with the exception of a few countries, are internal to the country, and my colleague from London—Fanshawe pointed this out. In our country it has been shown very glaringly to be women and children recruited off our first nations reserves. They are probably the single largest group that suffer from this crime. If we continue with the pattern and if we do not broaden the scope of our approach to deal with this horrendous crime, inevitably we will also find that over a period of time they will show up more and more in statistics as being the convicted offenders.
Again, I want to be very clear on the significance of this point. In the vast majority of crime, and I am talking close to 90% of all crimes, violent and non-violent, it is males who are convicted. That is the ratio in most countries. It certainly is the ratio in Canada. It runs about 85% male and 15% female in Canada currently. However, in this crime we see almost a reversal of that, where well over 50% of those convicted are women. They are not the major perpetrators. It is organized crime in the vast majority of cases, almost without exception. The members who are at the senior levels of organized crime are male, not female, so there is a major problem.
I want to go to the bill itself. I am concerned that if this pattern shows up here, the bill may end up victimizing the victims once again. We have to be very careful about who is going to end up being the target of this legislation. I told the author of the bill that I was working to perhaps clarify and tighten up the language in the second clause of the bill. Some terminology around recruits and exploitation needs some clarification in those circumstances.
In particular I am concerned with the third clause because it takes away judicial discretion. I am not sure if this was intended by the author or not, but by making the maximum sentence 10 years, it prevents conditional sentences being used. There are certainly going to be times, and again I am thinking specifically of women who are charged with this, where it would be appropriate to use conditional sentences, to impose conditions on them of counselling and so on, so they could be brought back into society.