Honourable senators, I rise before you to lend my support to Bill S-211, An Act to enact the Modern Slavery Act and to amend the Customs Tariff sponsored by Senator Miville-Dechêne . Though the bill’s prime objective is to eliminate forced and child labour from Canada, and involvement in the global supply chain, the bill calls on us to reflect on another kind of slavery we know to be in place in Canadian society, namely human trafficking. In other words, organized sexual exploitation and child sex abuse.

Before I joined the Senate, I was commissioned by Public Safety Canada to research and co-author a paper on the trafficking of Indigenous women and girls. The study was based on 76 interviews we completed with subject-matter experts, many of whom were survivors of sexual exploitation. They had been trafficked as children, teens and adults. We respectfully called these women the PhDs of the topic because of their extensive lived experience.

We also interviewed law enforcement agencies and organizations, and individuals who were front-line workers. The purpose of the study was to shed light on the mechanisms and ways in which the trafficking of Indigenous women and girls for the purposes of sexual exploitation occurred. I learned many things during this process, and I would like to share a few anecdotes on the importance and necessity of passing this bill.

Public Safety Canada defines human trafficking as the recruitment, transportation, harbouring and/or exercising control, direction or influence over the movements of a person in order to exploit that person, typically through sexual exploitation or forced labour. Human trafficking, sexual exploitation, survival sex and sex work are distinct experiences with a range of impacts that require targeted supports and policy responses. The difference in these terms is rooted in the act of giving consent. It’s essential to recognize that consent does not necessarily suggest an informed choice. As one expert remarked, it is rare that Aboriginal girls or women of colour experience sex work. They are often trafficked for power and control, and coerced into prostitution for their survival needs.

The element of consent in the trafficking definition is usually misunderstood, thus conflating sexual exploitation with sex work. Trafficking comprises the use of threat, force, deception, fraud, abduction, misuse of authority and making payment to coerce consent for the purpose of exploitation. A subject-matter expert also added that even the use of this language, the term “human trafficking” in place of sexual exploitation, may have the impact of marginalization since it forces Indigenous women into a framework that does not take into account the historical events and policies that have shaped their lives.

The Native Women’s Association of Canada has noted that First Nations, Métis and Inuit women make up 4% of the Canadian female population, but roughly 50% of trafficking victims. Twenty-five per cent of all trafficked people are under the age of 18. Though women and girls are the prime targets of trafficking, trans women, men and boys are also subjects.

We discovered that gangs are involved in the trafficking of Indigenous women and girls. They range from less sophisticated street gangs, or groups of co-offenders who may constitute a criminal-type organization, to fairly sophisticated ones in the form of escort services, massage parlours or exotic dancers. Women are generally recruited by various methods, including coercion through love and domestic violence. In other words, women are not even aware at times that they are being trafficked because they are in love with their trafficker.

We also discovered that it can be a young girl who does the recruiting — someone who appears to be a mirror image of her target — who initiates the selling of the dream of a better and more prosperous lifestyle. Peers are especially persuasive. Typically this translates into a pyramid scheme of sorts wherein recruiters take a share of the earnings for the girls they have recruited. High schools and even playgrounds are places where traffickers will entice and recruit Indigenous girls as young as grades six or seven. Sometimes they meet them on the way to school, luring them with gifts and promises of a better life. Social media is also used to entice young Indigenous girls, especially in rural communities where the charm of the big city or the promise of a good job is easier to use as a deceptive ploy. Some pimps or boyfriends will invite young girls to come to the city to party under the guise of a romantic wooing.

Imagine the dangers that beset a young girl who leaves a remote area and goes south for medical treatment. She arrives in a foreign, fast-moving environment and a young man or woman steps out of a van to offer her a ride or to go to a party. She accepts and is soon surrounded by strangers. She is offered drugs, takes them, and is maybe plied with alcohol. Later that night she is photographed in compromising positions. She is then threatened that the photos will be sent to her family or posted on social media. She’s then coerced into selling herself to pay back the money that was spent on her, in a never-ending cycle. At some point she may realize she doesn’t want to leave because her life was never better.

These horrific socio-economic determinants of sexual exploitation and trafficking result from factors such as the legacy of physical and sexual abuse experienced in the residential school system, dispossession of identity and culture via the Indian Act, violence, racism, and the marginalization of Indigenous women resulting in low self-esteem, poverty, and a vulnerability to being trafficked. Addictions and mental health issues among those who are trafficked are widespread and often the result of either being introduced to drugs as a method of control, or a way to escape the harsh realities of being trafficked or exploited.

The stories of the women are haunting and I will never forget them. One of the subject-matter experts shared how she had been exposed to violence through her own pimp, who over the years had burned her feet, broken her nose, beaten her with an untwisted coat hanger, broken her fingers and even went so far as jumping on her pregnant abdomen to cause a miscarriage. They are forced into working while they are sick, and forced to dress in a bikini with a fur coat outdoors in freezing cold weather.

The women and girls are moved through relatively well-known trafficking corridors and circuits. The trafficking of First Nations, Métis and Inuit women — and of non-Indigenous women, too — is generally triangular. For example, east to west, Halifax to Truro, Halifax to Montreal to Toronto. There is movement by boat, too. In an example of the economics of supply and demand, we find the increase in demand for sexual services matches the increase of men in the shipbuilding areas. More than one of the subject-matter experts I interviewed explained what a “Pocahontas Party” was. The men dressed up as the proverbial “John Smith” and the Indigenous women are paraded and dressed up in Pocahontas outfits. The experts said that these parties were commonly held on boats in the Niagara Region on the Great Lakes.

In the North, air travel is the primary means of long-distance transportation, so trafficked Inuit women follow major transportation hubs. For instance, the eastern Arctic airline flies women to Ottawa, while the western Arctic airline flies women to Edmonton and Winnipeg. Airports were identified as the point of recruitment in big cities like Montreal, especially for the Inuit. It is common for a trafficker to know someone in the community who acts as an informant when a girl plans to move to the city. Upon their arrival at the airport, traffickers lure the girls under the pretext of providing a place to stay or giving them access to resources.

A front-line support agency in the North clarified that people don’t leave the North to work the streets, but may go south to Ottawa to attend a doctor’s appointment. One woman breached the “rules of the house” in Ottawa and ended up on the street when kicked out. She was stranded with no money and no support system. In this case, she was extremely vulnerable.

In the northern Prairie regions, the circuits are from The Pas, Flin Flon and Selkirk to Winnipeg. Prince Albert is a gateway to northern Saskatchewan. Saskatoon is a gateway to the West, via Edmonton to Vancouver. Law enforcement participants cited Edmonton to Mississauga to Niagara Falls as a pipeline of movement. Another subject-matter expert explained that the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver is full of Saskatchewan Indigenous people, and they die there.

There’s another very poignant story I wish to share with you. It is of a woman named Sharon Acoose. When we interviewed Sharon, she said to me, “I will allow you to interview me on the one condition that whenever you talk about me, you say my name aloud, Sharon Acoose.”

I promised I would. Here is her story.

Her parents were residential school survivors. Sharon was sexually abused at home as a very young child. Sexual abuse became normalized for Sharon at a very young age. Her father wanted a better life for the family and moved them to the city, but once there, Sharon soon learned it became easier for her to earn money for the normalized behaviour of being sexually abused while she worked the streets. She was on the streets for 30 years, through pregnancies and child apprehensions.

Here is what Sharon said to me:

Each and every time we refer to individuals who are involved in the sex trade as “hookers,” “prostitutes,” “hoe,” . . . we dispirit them. No individual comes into this world as a hooker or prostitute. We all come into this world with spirit. Each and every interaction and every individual we come into contact with either contributes to involvement in the sex trade or involvement in a productive lifestyle. When a woman is abused by her relative or whomever, it does something to a woman’s Spirit. The Spirit leaves when they are being abused, and it comes back when it’s over.

Those words will haunt me forever.

When Sharon was about to have another child apprehended, something happened and she said, “No more,” and she reached out. She got help and began a journey to health and freedom from the life on the streets. Sharon went back to school and worked her way through high school and university, and Sharon earned a Ph.D. She now teaches and counsels women on the street. I have said her name every time I have spoken of trafficking issues over the years, and each time I do, I like to think that one more woman reaches out and finds Sharon, and Sharon helps them get off the street. She has written a book about her life called An Arrow in My Heart.

Interestingly enough, all of the subject-matter experts that we interviewed for this study were residential school survivors or had parents who attended residential school.

I now want to turn my attention to the 34 interviews we conducted with law enforcement agencies across Canada. I must share that I gained a new respect after this study. I realized how difficult it is from their perspective to put in place measures that can stop trafficking. They identified human trafficking as a “ghost crime,” adding, “there are thousands of victims, but people don’t report this type of crime.” This fact alone is an important point that supports the reporting requirements in the modern slavery act, Bill S-211.

All of the police organizations interviewed highlighted the difficulties of collecting data and reporting on cases related to the Indigenous status of victims. Traditionally, victims are reluctant to disclose trafficking as they may not self-identify as victims. Many consider their traffickers to be boyfriends. In addition, many Indigenous women are reluctant to disclose to law enforcement the fact that they are Indigenous. Historically, there has been little trust between Indigenous communities and the police. This reluctance is rooted in a history of mistreatment by the police, and the legacy of the fear continues.

Several police agencies serving areas where there are major infrastructure or natural resource projects reported that they have seen an increase in the sex trade and of human trafficking when major projects such as mining, oil extraction and shipbuilding get under way. This fact speaks to the importance of passing Bill S-209 as well, Senator McCallum’s bill.

An Ontario police officer commented to me:

“The average age of recruitment of human trafficking victims is 14 to 16 years old. That doesn’t mean we’ll find them at those ages, but we may find them at 18 to 20. It’s a huge juvenile problem. Last year, 33% of sex workers identified were juveniles . . . .” An officer from a Western province noted: “As Police, we’re standing on the tracks and can see it coming for many years.”

Many of the people we interviewed spoke of a Canadian crisis, evidenced by the sheer numbers of Indigenous women and girls who are subjected to normalized sexual and physical violence as children, sometimes as part of the child welfare system. They are trafficked, incarcerated, sterilized and go missing or are murdered. We owe thanks for the commitment of the many heroes who work on these issues, leaders like Diane Redsky, Executive Director of Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata Centre in Winnipeg, who has worked on the provincial strategy in Manitoba; and Valérie Pelletier and Trisha Baptie, who help women exit; and Cherry Smiley, a former anti-violence worker now pursuing a PhD, who all appeared on a panel today on sex trafficking and sexual exploitation. They are working tirelessly to eradicate exploitation of all kinds against Indigenous women and girls by focusing on the root causes, a systemic and coordinated approach that listens and heeds the perspectives of the women who have been trafficked and includes financial solutions to exit.

Senator Miville-Dechêne’s bill will bring transparency to the supply chains of multinationals who, along with making profits for their shareholders, have a civic responsibility to Canadians and the citizens of each individual country they do business in. Bill S-211 aims to make the seemingly invisible, visible. This type of innovative legislation must extend to other sectors of society where the plight of vulnerable populations is often overlooked and their stories are too often silenced. Meegwetch, marsi, ekosi.