It’s a real honour to speak on this upcoming February 22, which is the Canadian anti-human trafficking day—la journée contre la traite des personnes.

My first encounter with somebody who had been trafficked was at the beginning of the pandemic. There was a family staying in a tent under a bridge in my riding. The mother and daughter had been evicted from their home in the 905, and they had been moved into a shelter in downtown Toronto. While they were in there, the 19-year-old daughter had been kidnapped and trafficked for several months. While she was trafficked, she had been hog-tied and shot with fentanyl to make her addicted to fentanyl so that they would have control over her. They eventually escaped. This was at the beginning of the pandemic. The mother got her back, and the mother and mother’s boyfriend and the daughter were staying in a tent. There was no other place for them to go.

So we need to address root causes, and I’m going to be talking about addressing root causes in this.

There were 4,000 incidents of human trafficking that were reported to police between 2012 and 2022, and 94% of the victims were women and girls, and the average age of recruitment, as we just heard from the government side, is 13 years old. It’s an absolutely despicable crime, and it must be stopped at all levels.

I want to thank my colleagues who were involved in the passing of Bill 41, which is the Protection from Coerced Debts Incurred in relation to Human Trafficking Act. This bill is really important because, besides the sexual exploitation that happens with trafficking, there’s also financial exploitation. Traffickers will often go into a bank and take out a credit card in their victim’s name, and then that victim, after they escape, is left with that debt and the bad credit rating. This is how Richard Dunwoody, who is a resident in my riding—he came across survivors of human trafficking in shelters, and they could not get out of the shelters because of this financial debt. Because their credit rating had been destroyed, they weren’t able to rent a new place. What came of that is a program to support survivors, but also this legislation.

This legislation—if I could make a request to the government—has been passed. We’re waiting for the regulations so that it can be implemented. Those regulations cannot come quickly enough, because right now survivors with these financial debts are denied housing, they’re denied access to school, they’re harassed by credit agencies, and they’re often taken to court. So this legislation needs to get through as quickly as possible.

I also want to talk about some solutions. When I was talking with a woman who works with survivors of human trafficking earlier today, she said you need to address the root causes—poverty, housing insecurity and homelessness—because shelters and encampments are places that traffickers go to recruit and to kidnap people, just like that young woman I met at the beginning of the pandemic.

The other thing she said is that we need to provide escape routes. She said she often gets calls from a survivor, a victim of human trafficking, who wants to escape, and they’re looking for a safe place to go, but when the agency phones, every shelter is full. So they tell the victim this, and the victim says, “I’ll just stay with my trafficker.” If we don’t have an escape route, they can’t escape. The courage that it takes to escape human trafficking is really remarkable, and we need to reward it. We need to make sure that there’s a pathway, and these pathways have to be cognizant of the supports that people who have been trafficked need. As the woman said to me, trafficking is often associated with trauma and substance abuse. The women are often forced to have sex with five to 10 people a night. They’re up all night. The first thing they need to do when they escape is to detox, and there’s a shortage of detox beds in this province. We need low-barrier housing accommodation for the survivors when they’re escaping. The other thing the agent said they need is stable funding.

I heard from the government side that they’re reviewing—there was a five-year, $307-million grant to address human trafficking, and this is under review, but it expires in 2025. The agencies that support people who have been trafficked, who are survivors of human trafficking—to bring an end to human trafficking, those agencies need stable funding. They need to renew leases. They need to retain their staff. They need to do training programs. So it’s absolutely vital that that funding be extended and that the promise of that extended funding be made as soon as possible.