Je commence en français. La traite des personnes est l’un des crimes qui connaît la plus forte croissance dans le monde, et au Canada, l’Ontario en est la capitale. C’est une infraction criminelle grave selon le Code criminel du Canada. Elle consiste à recruter, à transporter ou à héberger une personne, ou à en contrôler les déplacements en utilisant la force, la contrainte physique ou psychologique, ou la tromperie. Les trafiquants endettent souvent leurs victimes, et ceci doit changer. Le projet de loi va protéger les victimes de traite des personnes contre toutes ces dettes.

I want to thank all of the members in the House and all of the members of the committee. In particular, I want to thank the member from Ottawa–Vanier, the member from Haliburton–Kawartha Lakes–Brock and the member from Guelph for co-sponsoring this legislation. This is a really important piece of legislation.

I first came across this issue when I met Richard Dunwoody. He had started a program called Project Comfort which was providing supports to people in shelters in our riding in Spadina–Fort York. He bought a large barbecue, and he was organizing barbecues. He organized clothing drives and other things for people in the shelters. When he was there, one of the things he came across was that many of the people in the shelters were survivors of human trafficking. The reason they couldn’t move out of the shelters was because while they were being trafficked, their traffickers had put imposed debts on their names.

Some of them had been kidnapped while they were students; they had bad OSAP debts. Sometimes, the traffickers applied for OSAP loans in the victim’s name. Sometimes, the trafficker would have the victim driving a vehicle without proper insurance, without proper papers, and that person would get pulled over and fined. And then that fine was on the victim’s name, even when they were able to get away from the trafficker. So these debts follow the people, and because of them, the survivors, even when they escaped, had bad credit ratings; and because of those credit ratings, they weren’t able to rent accommodation.

And when they received, for example, payments for example for Ontario Works or ODSP, some of them were actually clawed back. Some of them were clawed back by the government to pay for these bad OSAP debts or to pay for these fines. So they were stuck.

So, Richard Dunwoody—and I’ve got to give credit to him because the reason that we’re all here today and that this legislation has come so far is because of his incredible advocacy—started another project, called Project Recover, to support survivors and try to expunge these fraudulent debts that were incurred in the survivors’ names.

This legislation has gone through a couple of different versions. The first one: I brought forward a motion in 2020 to have the government expunge fraudulent debts and government fines. Then MPP Collard from Ottawa–Vanier brought forward the first version of this legislation in 2021, and now we’re in the second version of this legislation. I’ve got to give credit to the member from Ottawa–Vanier. She was able to get all-party support for this legislation, and this is—in the five years that I’ve been serving—only the second piece of legislation that I can think of off the top of my head where we’ve got all-party support. This is the kind of thing that I would like to see a lot more in this legislature, where everybody’s coming together.

When we were in committee, there was no question that this legislation was going to get through. Everybody in the committee from all parties was supportive of this legislation. There were questions about how it’s going to be implemented, and there are still questions about making sure that when this is implemented survivors are not revictimized by having to retell their story over and over again.

And to the people in the government services who will be developing the implementation plan, please keep that in my mind. We’ve got it in Hansard now, but it’s also in the minutes from the committee meetings. It’s an important piece of legislation because it frees the survivors of human trafficking from those debts so that they can get on with their lives.

I want to thank all of the members. I’ve thanked the members who have brought this forward, but I also want to thank the Canadian Bankers Association, and I want to thank in particular the survivors through several press conferences through the last three years who have come forward and told their stories so that we could understand what was happening and could understand why this legislation was so essential. Can we give a round of applause? And we have a survivor here today.

Applause.