Human trafficking in Canada is prohibited by law, and is considered a criminal offence whether it occurs entirely within Canada or involves the "transporting of persons across Canadian borders. Public Safety Canada (PSC) 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. It is often described as a modern form of slavery."Public Safety Canada, National Action Plan to Combat Human Trafficking: "What is Human Trafficking?"
Between 2009 and 2018, police services in Canada have reported 1,708 incidents of human trafficking. In this period, Nova Scotia and Ontario recorded average annual rates higher than the national average. Accounting for 39% of the total Canadian population, Ontario has accounted for 68% of all police-reported human trafficking incidents since 2009; Nova Scotia, on the other hand, accounts for 3% of the overall population and 6% of all human trafficking incidents. According to Statistics Canada, evidence suggests that Nova Scotia, and Halifax in particular, are part of a corridor that is frequently used to "transport victims of human trafficking from Atlantic Canada to larger urban centres elsewhere in Canada."
Human trafficking has become a significant legal and political issue in the country, and Canadian legislators have been criticized for having failed to deal with the problem in a more systematic way. In 2007, the Office to Combat Trafficking in Persons was formed in British Columbia, making it the first province of Canada to address human trafficking in a formal manner. In 2010 came the biggest human trafficking case in Canadian history, which involved the dismantling of the Dömötör-Kolompár criminal organization. On 6 June 2012, the Government of Canada established the National Action Plan to Combat Human Trafficking in order to oppose human trafficking; the Human Trafficking Taskforce was subsequently established to replace the Interdepartmental Working Group on Trafficking in Persons as the body responsible for the development of public policy related to human trafficking in Canada.
In 2019, the Canadian Centre to End Human TraffickingThe Canadian Centre to End Human Trafficking launched the Canadian Human Trafficking Hotline, funded in part by PSC, to provide crisis response to people being trafficked and tip reporting.Canada's National Human Trafficking Hotline
The U.S. State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons placed Canada in "Tier 1" in 2017 and 2023. US Government website, Trafficking in Persons Report 2023
In 2023, the Organised Crime Index gave the country a score of 4 out of 10 for human trafficking, noting a slight increase in the crime. Organised Crime Index website, Canada: 2023
RCMP Regarding human trafficking, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) is tasked with:
enforcing the law seeking out and identifying potential victims via awareness initiatives and investigations helping build and foster crime prevention initiatives collaborating with other law enforcement and government agencies to share information and coordinate the approach.
In 2005, the RCMP estimated that 600-800 people are trafficked into Canada annually, and that additional 1,500-2,200 are trafficked through Canada into the United States. This was updated in 2010.
In 2011, Corporal Jassy Bindra stated that there were more than 30 ongoing investigations into human trafficking across Canada. Cindy Kovalak is the Human Trafficking Awareness Coordinator for the Northwest Region Immigration and Passport Section of the RCMP.
Law Both the Criminal Code and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) have specific sections that address human trafficking.
IRPA brought Canada's first anti-trafficking legislation into force in 2002, prohibiting bringing anyone into Canada by means of abduction, fraud, deception, or use or threat of force or coercion. While Criminal Code incidents may or may not involve the crossing of international borders, IRPA specifically refers to incidents of cross-border human trafficking.
On 29 June 2010, the 40th Canadian Parliament enacted An Act to amend the Criminal Code (minimum sentence for offences involving trafficking of persons under the age of eighteen years). The act established a mandatory sentencing of 5 years' imprisonment for those charged with the trafficking of children within Canada.
On 28 June 2012, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (trafficking in persons) amended the Criminal Code to enable the Government of Canada to prosecute Canadians for trafficking in persons while outside Canada.
UN Protocol Until the year 2000, there was no internationally recognized definition of sex trafficking. The United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons defines human trafficking in the following way:Trafficking in Persons shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring, or receipt of persons, by means of use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction or fraud, of deceptions, of the abuse of power of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payment or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over other persons, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at the minimum, the exploitations of the prostitutions of other or other forms of sexual exploitation, forces labor or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.According to the UN Protocol, sex trafficking does not require cross-border movements of humans. However, many people continue to confuse or use the terms human trafficking and human smuggling interchangeably. Domestic sex trafficking has recently been gaining attention in Canada.
Canada ratified the 2000 UN TIP Protocol in May 2002. United Nations Treaty Collection website, Chapter XVIII Penal Matters section, Section 12a retrieved August 19, 2024
Bill C-49 The UN Protocol itself did not give legal effect to the definition, and countries were required to adopt legislative and other measures to establish criminal offences. Following the ratification in Canada of the Protocol, Parliament passed legislation to amend the Criminal Code with Bill C-49.
Bill C-49, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (trafficking in persons), came into force on 25 November 2005, creating three new additional indictable offences specifically to address human trafficking and which can be used by law enforcement to address this crime. The Act amends the Criminal Code to specifically prohibit trafficking in persons in Canada. Previously, the Code contained no provisions to specifically prohibit trafficking in persons, although a number of offences—including kidnapping, uttering threats, and extortion—played a role in targeting this crime.
Bill C-49 added to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act by going beyond the focus on immigration and making trafficking in persons a criminal offence. The Act contains three prohibitions. The first contains the global prohibition on trafficking in persons, defined as the recruitment, transport, transfer, receipt, concealment or harbouring of a person, or the exercise of control, direction or influence over the movements of a person, for the purpose of exploitation. The second prohibits a person from benefiting economically from trafficking. The third prohibits the withholding or destroying of identity, immigration, or travel documents to facilitate trafficking in persons.
Bill C-49 also ensures that trafficking may form the basis of a warrant to intercept private communications and to take bodily samples for DNA analysis, and permits inclusion of the offender in the sex offender registry. Finally, Bill C-49 expands the ability to seek restitution to "victims" who are subjected to bodily or psychological harm.
Aboriginal women and girls
According to the Native Women's Association of Canada, the overrepresentation of Indigenous women and girls in sexual exploitation and trafficking in Canada has been explored on repeated occasion through a span of years. The impacts of colonialism seemed to have remain as the identified root cause, including "the legacies of the residential schools and their inter-generational effects, family violence, childhood abuse, poverty, homelessness, lack of basic survival necessities, race and gender-based discrimination, lack of education, migration, and substance addictions." Colonization in Canada has taken and maintains the form of systematic discrimination, embodied in harmful policies and legislation that have greatly damaged Aboriginal societies. Research into human trafficking in Canada shows that Aboriginal women and children are the majority of those trafficked domestically.
Recruitment Traffickers mask their exploitation behind the appearance of claiming to care about the girl, and the relationship may start out with expensive gifts. Sometimes girls are made to recruit other girls, their motivation is frequently not their own economic profit but fear of violence from their own trafficker if they refuse or fail to bring in someone else. The dancers who end up trafficked are Aboriginal girls who are moved many times across provinces for their job until they have become disconnected from friends and family. Aboriginal girls, particularly in rural communities, are sometimes lured through communications with traffickers in the city who promise them employment (in respectable jobs, not trafficking). Hitchhiking is more of a direct approach, where girls are picked up attempting to relocate or travel, and are pushed into sexual exploitation.
A heavy presence for recruitment is the use of gangs. One of the motivators for a gang presence in the sex trafficking of Aboriginal women and girls may be the perception that trafficking women and girls for sex acts is a low-risk crime for incarceration. Gangs use similar recruitment methods as other more straightforward traffickers. Many identified that drug addiction was a popular tool for gangs, seemingly over that of force, for achieving these women's compliance. "For vulnerable Aboriginal youth, often faced with low self-esteem and a lack of sense of belonging, gangs can offer both of these through enrollment". Sometimes, their recruitment process requires sexual exploitation or that they recruit others. Gang presence is on the rise, and represents a growing, if not completely quantifiable, source for active recruitment of Aboriginal women and girls into sex trafficking. Systemic discrimination in terms of overrepresentation in the criminal justice system and the overrepresentation in the child welfare system factor largely in the vulnerability of these women and girls, which can lead to being trafficked.