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View Arnold Viersen Profile
CPC (AB)
Switching to Ms. McGuire-Cyrette, the national hotline for human trafficking victims has been up and running now for a couple of years.
Do you have any experience with it, and has it been achieving its stated goals?
Coralee McGuire-Cyrette
View Coralee McGuire-Cyrette Profile
Coralee McGuire-Cyrette
2021-06-17 11:30
I don't know much about the hotline. I do know that it's beginning to collect data.
Really, the gap is if a trafficked woman or girl or child need to access services. That's the gap, all across Canada. There are no specialized services across Canada.
ONWA started up one of the first comprehensive exiting programs in Thunder Bay. When we began to do the work, we recognized, in Ontario, that there's a triangle of trafficking indigenous children and youth and women, from Thunder Bay to Toronto to Ottawa. That's the triangle, and that's just across the province.
Women call us all the time from other provinces, and there are no specialized services on the ground to help them. Nobody is reaching out to the youth to help them. The fact that children and youth have an expectation to keep themselves safe is a systemic failure in our communities and in our society.
I echo what my fellow leaders here are saying and speaking to. The violence against indigenous women and children has become so normalized that we need to have this conversation. Really, we need to make sure that this stays illegal, period.
Most trafficking victims are under the age of 18. Those who are over the age of 18 also need support, wherever they're at on the spectrum. There's no fine line between whether you're into prostitution or being trafficked. Each day it definitely does differentiate, but the main point is that we need to have supportive services. We have to change this here in Canada, and there is nothing on the ground.
View Bob Bratina Profile
Lib. (ON)
Thanks very much.
That brings us to time.
Mr. Powlowski, for six minutes. Go ahead.
View Marcus Powlowski Profile
Lib. (ON)
I'm going to direct my questions to my fellow Thunder Bayan or Thunder Bayite. We don't even know what to call ourselves, unlike Hamiltonians or Torontonians.
Cora, you mentioned the route for sex trafficking: Thunder Bay, Toronto, Ottawa. It leads me to think gangs, right away. How much of this is related to gangs? I know in Thunder Bay we have a lot of gangs: indigenous gangs, Toronto gangs and Ottawa gangs. How much does this problem all swirl around and involve the gangs?
Coralee McGuire-Cyrette
View Coralee McGuire-Cyrette Profile
Coralee McGuire-Cyrette
2021-06-17 11:32
It's not as much as you would think. It's more around “violence knows no boundaries”. When there is organized criminalized activity involved, they don't have policies to follow or bureaucratic processes that they need to change in order to do different tactics. They're very organized. They read the news. I wouldn't doubt if some in organized crime are watching our testimonies here today in order to figure out the tactics and to come up with new strategies.
There is an organized crime aspect to it, definitely. With indigenous women and girls, there's also the history of colonization that also impacts. Indigenous women and girls have to negotiate their safety for their basic human rights to meet their basic needs. There really is a comprehensive oppression. We have to look at how we stop sexualizing our children and our youth. Where is the sexual violence programming in all of our communities?
If you look at a map of Ontario, and you see where there are sexual predators, it's across the entire province. The #MeToo movement actually stopped in indigenous communities, because it's not safe to talk about and to disclose sexual violence. That's one of the root causes of trafficking, from what we've seen with the women we're working with.
View Marcus Powlowski Profile
Lib. (ON)
Coralee McGuire-Cyrette
View Coralee McGuire-Cyrette Profile
Coralee McGuire-Cyrette
2021-06-17 11:34
It's everything. When you look at why there are such high rates of trafficking, it's because there are so many different parts of it. It is organized crime. It is gangs. It's families. It's communities. Violence against indigenous women is happening from everyone in society. We have to stop that normalization of people approaching a young child on city transportation, who's just trying to get to and from home, and you have a perpetrator targeting children and youth online. It's one part organized, one part crime and one part our society.
View Marcus Powlowski Profile
Lib. (ON)
How much does this problem also involve drugs, and getting people addicted to drugs, and therefore financially obligated to someone else?
Coralee McGuire-Cyrette
View Coralee McGuire-Cyrette Profile
Coralee McGuire-Cyrette
2021-06-17 11:35
That's one part of the control. You get what are called “gifts with invisible strings.” One part of control is around addiction. Here on the ground, in the city, barrier-free access to mental health and addiction services is very rare. I would say that across the country we're seeing that as another gap. The lack of instant, barrier-free access to the services that they need, including for addiction, makes it very difficult for us to help support exiting.
View Marcus Powlowski Profile
Lib. (ON)
The gift is to give someone drugs to get them hooked, and then to pay back they have to do something for whoever is using them. Is that how this works?
Coralee McGuire-Cyrette
View Coralee McGuire-Cyrette Profile
Coralee McGuire-Cyrette
2021-06-17 11:36
That's one part. Another part is that here in the north there is no transportation. We have to look at transportation services. Women are being trafficked in order to get to a medical appointment, if they're from a northern community, to get into the city. That's another piece of this puzzle.
View Marcus Powlowski Profile
Lib. (ON)
This is quite a depressing topic, but I was interested that one of the things you suggested was debt forgiveness for student loans, which certainly suggests that at least some people are getting out of this kind of “work” and getting educated. Can you give us any good stories about people who have managed to transition out into a better life?
Coralee McGuire-Cyrette
View Coralee McGuire-Cyrette Profile
Coralee McGuire-Cyrette
2021-06-17 11:37
Yes. Prior to the pandemic we started a ride-along with the Thunder Bay police. The part of the ride-along was actually directed to us from survivors. They said that we needed to build a relationship with all services in order to comprehensively address this. In our ride-along, we were actually able to connect with two children who had just gotten onto the streets during that time, and we safely exited them within days of their getting onto the streets. They are now safe.
We know in terms of the recovery time, the healing time, the sooner that we can help with exiting strategies, the sooner the women are able to reclaim their lives. That's the part that's missing here. We need those specialized programs and services, as Ms. Smiley had talked about, which don't exist. You can't just have regular victim services to do this work. They do not work. We need specialized programs and services.
View Bob Bratina Profile
Lib. (ON)
Go ahead, Ms. Bérubé. You have six minutes.
View Sylvie Bérubé Profile
BQ (QC)
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
My question is for Ms. McGuire‑Cyrette.
I'm going to continue along the same lines as Mr. Powlowski. You talked about colonization, systemic discrimination and support for communities.
According to your research, what can we do to better support communities in response to human trafficking?
Results: 76 - 90 of 8639 | Page: 6 of 576

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