Status of Women committee  Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Good morning. Does every member of the committee have a copy of our brief? I'll be referring to it in the interests of time. Okay, great. So I'll submit that for the committee's consideration. I'm just going to focus today on what I think are t

Status of Women committee  Just briefly, on your first question, with respect to the interim guidelines, this is the challenge that I spoke about earlier, which is that there are so many pieces to the puzzle. As you know, there is a 17-member interdepartmental working group. The analogy I came up with is t

Status of Women committee  Thank you very much. I can answer part of it in French and continue in English.

Status of Women committee  Okay. First, on the child sex tourism issue, it is very difficult to engage in extraterritorial investigations. There's no doubt about that. The only successful prosecution was with respect to Donald Bakker in British Columbia. He was the first man convicted under the child sex

Status of Women committee  I see it as fulfilling a central function of gathering all the research, but making substantive proposals and actually working with departments to implement pilot projects and to direct funding. So this would be the office that would actually have a framework in place where they

Status of Women committee  I will start with the funding issue. As you pointed out, it's the biggest issue right now. I don't know what the amount would be. Thomas Axworthy has said $100 million for human trafficking initiatives is required. I think that sounds like a reasonable figure. It certainly sounds

Status of Women committee  Again, we draw our inspiration from what has worked internationally. One of our projects dealt with young people who were told that they were going to go and get a job in the big city. In Cameroon we started to work on a program to set up a safe community network. There was one

Status of Women committee  I just want to add, in Alberta, the PChIP legislation, the Protection of Children Involved in Prostitution, is another piece that the committee would want to look at because it does take child protection quite a bit further than most of the other jurisdictions. With respect to y

Status of Women committee  Absolutely. Also, just to briefly mention, since you raised the issue of the duration for the visa, I think three years would not be consistent with what other countries do. We'd create some odd incentives perhaps. Our suggestion is that in keeping with international practices,

Status of Women committee  Okay.

Status of Women committee  Can I make a brief point on that, Madam Chair?

Status of Women committee  Of course.

Status of Women committee  In my view, it's most important to focus on the successes that are occurring in Canada. We're not looking for a cheque from the committee, or for the government to write off a cheque. That's the goal for substantial funding here. What is needed, though...for example, in Vancouv

Status of Women committee  I think it's important not to exaggerate how big a problem it is; otherwise you may get concerned when you start to deal with it that the victims are not showing up. Canada is not the worst country in the world; it's probably not in the worst half of the countries in the world fo

Status of Women committee  Our experience in looking at this has been that as countries open their borders for the free flow of ideas and free trade, of course, it also opens up the markets for abuse. We haven't seen a direct correlation between free trade and the trafficking industry, though. It doesn't m