Hon. Marco E. L. Mendicino, P.C., M.P., Minister of Public Safety: We need to work together with Indigenous communities, even in Quebec, where I know the Canada Border Services Agency, the RCMP and the Sûreté du Québec continue to work with this community to prevent illegal firearms trafficking.

You are right. The work isn’t easy, and there are complications. That’s one of the reasons I travelled to the United States last week to accelerate and strengthen our collaboration with our American counterparts. I believe that there is an opportunity to make further progress on this issue by making investments, and that is one of the things our government promised.

We have to focus on efforts on the ground and invest the necessary resources. We have to be able to provide all the tools to those on the front lines so they can stop firearms at the border.

[English]

Hon. Marco E. L. Mendicino, P.C., M.P., Minister of Public Safety: Thank you very much for the question, senator, and thank you for underlining the scourge of human trafficking, which disproportionately impacts Indigenous women and young girls, as we saw painfully laid out in the MMIWG report, which is one of the reasons why we’re committed to implementing the recommendations that are in it.

I was just in British Columbia a little less than two weeks ago to make an announcement of approximately — and I don’t want to mislead you — but I think it was $3 million to $5 million that was going directly to The Salvation Army and a partnering organization to combat human trafficking on the ground. This is part of a broader investment which we have allocated specifically to reduce human trafficking; I don’t know if you know the statistics, but 90% of all of the victims of human trafficking in Canada are women or young girls, which is truly a shocking number.

I assure you that this is a top priority. I assure you that we are allocating funds to meet that challenge and to provide support to those victims of human trafficking so that they can find their way back into communities safely and securely. I assure you that we are continuing to provide law enforcement with all the tools that they need to fight this scourge.

[Translation]

Hon. Salma Ataullahjan: Minister, the 2019 Final Report of the National Inquiry Into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls noted that while Indigenous women represented only 4% of Canada’s population in 2016, they comprised nearly 50% of victims of human trafficking. In September 2019, just before the federal election that year, the Trudeau government reinstated the National Strategy to Combat Human Trafficking after cancelling the previous Conservative government’s strategy in 2016.

Minister, how much of the $75 million under your government’s strategy has been allocated to directly help and protect Indigenous women and girls against human trafficking? How has this funding been allocated?

Hon. Marco E. L. Mendicino, P.C., M.P., Minister of Public Safety: To begin with, senator, I would point out that we were in Washington, D.C., just last week when this priority was specifically discussed. We talked about how we could prevent the kind of illegal trafficking of intellectual property, other counterfeits and other properties that have been stolen across our borders so they are interdicted.

Coming out of that meeting, there were concrete assurances from both sides to share information and intelligence so that our law enforcement branches, including the Canada Border Services Agency and the RCMP, and, on the other side of the border, Customs and Border Protection and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, known as ATF, are working at the highest level of collaboration so that we can stop that crime from occurring in the first place.

Your question is very timely. It comes on the heels of a very productive meeting last week to battle transnational crime on this front, and we’re committed to continuing to work on it together.