What we think we know about human trafficking in Canada

Jordan Before we begin, a warning: today’s show contains depictions of sexual violence, and sexual assault.

Human trafficking, and sex trafficking, in particular is one of those crimes with a fictional image. One of the list of crimes that have been so distorted by repeated depictions in popular culture or bipartisan politicians that for many of us, they’ve come to be seen as something they’re not. Case in point: the traditional myth of sex trafficking goes something like this. A young woman or even a girl is snatched off the street by anonymous traffickers she’s never met, hustled into a car and moved far away to some disgusting low rent building where she’s chained to a bed and sold for money. Basically, the movie Taken, if you want a literal example.

There is a lot wrong with that. First, traffickers are rarely strangers to their victims, and victims are turned to trafficking gradually by people they know. They aren’t typically kidnapped, they aren’t literally chained to beds, and they’re not working in abandoned warehouses or dock buildings. Trafficking happens in clean and relatively upscale hotels and motels across Canada, the kind you’d stay at on a business trip. And if you know what to look for, you can see it happen in plain sight. All you have to do is watch.

VeraCity: Fighting Traffick Clip 1 Any motel that you go past, I don’t care where you are, someone is being trafficked in it, guaranteed.

Jordan Our guest today went to London, Ontario, to investigate human trafficking in Canadian cities.

VeraCity: Fighting Traffick Clip 2 So I was trafficked out of this motel for seven months. To look at it, you wouldn’t think anything. But what’s going on in these rooms is unbelievable.

Jordan She spoke to women who are working to bring awareness to the crimes taking place in hotels across the country and to try and figure out how this happens right under so many people’s noses. What makes victims stay with their abusers? Why do so few of them speak out or go to the authorities? And what do you need to know to see it if the real crime is happening in front of you?

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Cristina Howorun is a reporter with City News and the reporter behind Fighting Traffic , a VeraCity documentary that you can watch tonight at 10:00 p.m. on City News channels across the country, except in the Central time zone where it airs at 09:00 p.m..

Hey, Cristina.

Cristina Hello, Jordan.

Jordan Maybe we can just start with, where did this investigation begin? How did your documentary start?

Cristina It actually started when I was reflecting on a story I had done about a convicted murderer, and I know that many of the charges he was facing also included trafficking. So I wanted to find out what ended up happening with those trafficking charges, and I couldn’t find a quick answer. It looked like maybe nobody covered that part of it. I just couldn’t find a media response. And then I started looking to find out what actually happens to human traffickers. So we often see the media release that comes out from Ottawa Police, Montreal, Toronto, wherever, that says this guy’s wanted for trafficking or this duo is part of this, or this female whomever, and everybody will report that. But very rarely do we actually follow through the entire court process.

And I know that there’s a lot of reasons for that. I know it’s because there’s often publication bans, there usually is publication bans that are in effect. So you can’t really cover most of the story. So it was very difficult to find out what had actually happened to many different traffickers. And that’s when I remembered an advocate that I had worked with many years ago named Megan Walker.

Megan (Clip) One girl can bring in $250-300,000 a year for a trafficker. $250,000. Think about the number of men that have paid to rape those girls and women.

Cristina …and she worked for the London Abused Women’s Center. She was an executive director there. And so I reached out to her to find out how I could get these answers. And this wasn’t for a story. It was just out of pure curiosity. And that’s when she told me all of the amazing work that she was doing and that other women were doing outside of the legal system to try to stop trafficking. So I knew I just had to get out there and see what was happening on the streets.

Jordan We’re going to talk about what happened on the streets in just a second, but maybe introduce us to Megan a little bit. You mentioned you’d worked with her before, what’s she like? And give me details on the kind of work she does.

Cristina So Megan Walker just recently retired within the past couple of months from the London Abused Women’s Centre. She’s a former city Councillor. She’s a former talk show radio host out in London. But what she’s done over the past decade and change has turned the London Abused Women’s Centre into an advocacy place. So, yes, it certainly helps women that are victims of male dominated violence. But she expanded it to no longer just focus on intimate partner violence, but also trafficking issues, online bullying and luring of women and girls. And she’s become really a force to be reckoned with.

Now, if you meet this woman, she’s like 5″1 100 pounds soaking wet, and she is fierce. She will go to bat against anything that she thinks is harming women and girls. And this is an area that she took a lot of interest in because she admits that, yes, there are women and girls and women and men that choose to work in the sex trade. But overwhelmingly, the people that are involved in the sex trade are not there by choice. And so she’s really fighting for those individuals.

Jordan And she took you out, I guess, on a stakeout out to the streets? Tell me about that.

Cristina So Megan has been working with police forces all across the country and governments as well to deal with the trafficking issue. And we decided that she would take us out to a couple of hotels and show us what she does in her off time.

Megan (Clip) So let’s just take a little drive through while we’re here, shall we?

Cristina What she will often do, because police aren’t charging sex purchasers up to the level that it’s actually happening, is she’ll sit in a couple of choice hotels’ parking lots, and she’ll record what she sees. So she has a couple of things that she looks for. Is this man coming in with no luggage? Is he leaving within 20 to 45 minutes or so? Is he on the phone right before he gets in there, checking a text right before he walks into the hotel and then coming out empty handed both ways. And she sits and she’ll record and she’ll take note of their license plate.

Megan (Clip) Okay. So who is this guy and where is he going? Let’s see when he comes out. Usually it’s half an hour, 45 minutes at the most.

Cristina …and when they return, if she believes it was somebody that may have been purchasing sex, she will approach them, give them a flyer saying, hey, we’re just monitoring this area, a lot of sex trafficking is happening here.

Megan (Clip) …we’re just monitoring all the activities at the hotel to help women who are being trafficked. I just wanted to pass this on to you in the event that you’re back in there and you see any suspicious activity.

Cristina …if you happen to see anything, please call this number. And she’ll go back to her car, and she knows that she has no enforcement capability. She’s not trying to bring down a John, but she’s hoping that by doing that, maybe that individual will report things if they weren’t involved in it or will at least reconsider their activities.

So she does things like this. And in our stakeouts, we saw so many people in one hotel in particular, which was a nice chain hotel or a decent chain hotel that you would not expect that. It was a family place. We saw so many people walking in right after dinner, right after work. So just that sweet spot where you could say to your partner at home, ‘oh I was stuck in traffic or in a meeting’. And so we’re talking like, 06:00 at night in some of these situations. Heading there, leaving within 25, 30, 40 minutes, walking in with nothing in their hands, coming out with nothing in the hands. We can’t say that they were all sex purchasing, but it was an obscene amount of people that we saw exhibiting that behaviour.

Megan (Clip) There’s a lot of stuff happening there right now. Mostly, what I care about is tracking what’s happening. We’ll make some notes. If we see some suspicious activity, and then we do a walk through.

Cristina We went into hotels. We went into so many hotels after dark with our hidden cameras to see what would happen. Nobody stopped us. And granted, we are two unassuming women. She’s an older woman. She’s just retired. We don’t look like we’re causing trouble, but we had free rein walking around entire hotels well after 11:00 at night with our hidden cameras. And we actually saw something that she had warned me about before.

Megan (Clip) So there’s a couple of things to pay attention to about this door. Somebody has at sometime, jimmied that door open.

Cristina …that sometimes traffickers will booby trap a woman’s room, one of their victim’s room.

Megan (Clip) So if she were to open that door, it would fall and he’ll know they left the room.

Cristina …essentially, it’s to ensure that if they leave the room without the trafficker’s permission, he or she will know that they have left.

Jordan How does that work?

Cristina Sometimes it’s more elaborate, particularly if it’s being done at a home or in a basement apartment or an Airbnb where you can set things up. But in this hotel room that we saw, it was a ribbon. It was simply a fairly thick ribbon that had been affixed to the door handle from the outside. So whomever was in that room, if they opened that door, the ribbon would fall and you would not be able to hook it back up without being on the other side of the room. So they would have been caught. It’s not like they would have actually been facing violence by leaving. It’s not like something is going to happen to them, but by leaving, the trafficker would know. We’re not 100% sure that that was a trafficker, but that’s exactly what Megan said we would likely see. And that’s exactly what we ended up seeing.

Jordan So did you talk to anybody at the hotel about this? Did you tell the manager, the owner?

Cristina We did. We sought out the front desk manager.

Megan (Clip) Excuse me. Are you the manager here?

Cristina …we spoke with him.

Megan (Clip) I’m from the London Abuse Women’s Centre. I know there are a lot of hotels at this end that have a lot of trafficking. This one is one people talk about a lot, for some reason.

Cristina …we asked him to call the police.

Megan (Clip) …if you call the police, it will be fairly obvious to them as they’re walking by.

Cristina We knew that we couldn’t open that door. And Megan’s worked with victims of violence for so many years. She knew that if we were to knock on that door, we could be putting that person in more danger. And so it was best for us to get the police involved. And so we spoke with the front desk manager. We told him what we saw, and we said it’s pretty obvious that something’s happening here and you should call the police.

Megan (Clip) …I think it’s your responsibility,

Hotel Manager (Clip) As you mentioned, that you want to call police.

Megan (Clip) No, I said you would call…

Hotel Manager (Clip) I will let the front desk know.

Megan There’s nobody there, we walked by.

How do you stop the men from coming in and out and in?

Hotel Manager (Clip) We do not stop.

Megan (Clip) You just know the trafficking is going on.

Hotel Manager (Clip) Yes, we know that, there’s a lot of questions I cannot answer, so you can just contact my general manager…

Cristina And he said no. If she wanted to call the police, she could call the police. And so she did. And it wasn’t a top priority for them. And she spoke directly with the human trafficking unit. It wasn’t like she was just calling 9-1-1 or the non-emergency line. She called a human trafficking officer directly. Now we do know that eventually they did go out and verify her. But certainly not while we were there and we were there for quite some time.

Jordan And if I’m understanding from the rest of your documentary and the work you’ve done, this is not an altogether uncommon situation. Do we have any idea how large this industry is and how many women are lured into it every year in Canada?

Cristina It’s heartbreaking that we don’t have adequate, complete statistics. So the best example I can give you is that in 2019, there was a 44% increase in police reported incidents of human trafficking. That’s a massive amount of new calls on this. But most victims don’t go to the police. They are too scared too. They’ve been told that they will be charged. They are fearful because a lot of times a trafficker will use a friend as a decoy. And I’ve heard stories from survivors where they thought they were talking to a police officer or they thought they were talking to a John that would help them. But really, it was a decoy sent in by their trafficker to pretend to be somebody that could help them to see what they would do.

So a lot of women are just absolutely petrified. They don’t want to speak to the police because they are too scared to. They’ve been told if they go to the police, that harm will come to their other family members, that they won’t believe them. So what are you going to do then? I’m going to just get you back anyways, and it’s going to be worse when they get back. So we don’t have good statistics that way.

What we do know, for example, is London, Ontario, and it’s really the test market city for so many things. A lot of companies actually use London because it really is very representative of the rest of Canada. So London has a population of about 400,000 people. In an 18 month period, the London Abused Women’s Centre saw over 1200 unique human trafficking victims going through just one of their programs. So we have an understanding that it’s much bigger than police reported incidents. It’s much bigger than the amount of charges that are laid. It’s very prevalent. And it’s happening from coast to coast.

Jordan And while you were doing this investigation in London, you met someone named Caroline Pugh-Roberts. Can you tell me who she is and what she’s done?

Cristina Caroline is the epitome of a warrior woman. I’ll just say this: she is a survivor. And when she was 35 years old, while dealing with the loss of her husband and several friends within a year, she met a man. And this is the Romeo Pimp. This is one of the most common types of traffickers.

Caroline Pugh-Roberts (Clip) I didn’t know about trafficking. If you’d have used the word trafficking to me, I would have, like, stared blankly at you and said, What’s that? I thought it was my choice and that I was doing for family, whatever needed to be done.

Cristina And he love bombed her. That’s what she’ll say. He adored her. He would buy her gifts. He tried to take care of her. She thought she was in love, and this would be a good man. She moved in with him, and then he lost his job. Or he claimed to have lost his job. And then they were getting evicted. And he said, It’s your turn to help this family. I need you to start dancing at the local strip bar. Just some quick cash, do it a couple of times, get the money And then we can figure out this financial situation and move on. She’d never even been in a strip club before.

Caroline Pugh-Roberts (Clip) So many young women are looking for family. They’re looking for love and bonding. They are masters of manipulation. They alternate between the lover boy and the gorilla pimp. If you didn’t do something that they wanted, they started burning you. I’m, especially here, covered in cigarette burns.

Cristina And she did it, thinking that this is going to be a one, two time hit, just enough money for us to get our stuff together. And instead, it was something that she had to do for eight years. And every single night she had a quota, $500. She tried to leave. He broke her toes. He started bringing men to their home for her to sleep with. She had no choice. And this happened for eight years. Every time she tried to leave, the violence got worse. At one point, she had a part of her body amputated.

Caroline Pugh-Roberts (Clip) I had been physically, psychologically, emotionally and spiritually browbeaten into submission. And I still thought I was in love. I still thought that. And I had come to believe that the only reason I was alive was because of him.

Cristina She finally got out. And when she did, she resolved that she would never allow another woman to go through this. And so since then, she’s been working with the Salvation Army’s human trafficking Unit. And this is a woman that works 24/7. At 1 in the morning, her phone is ringing by victims. I’ve been in the car with her for hours and hours and hours on end. And it’s like being in the car with an operator because she’s got two cell phones going. One of them is going to be ringing every couple of minutes, and we’re always pulling over on the side of the road, and she’s always triaging survivor’s problems.

It could be that they’re in need of methadone because they’re still grappling with an addiction, or they need help in finding office clothes for a job interview. Or it could be good news, like with her help they got their GED or they’ve been accepted into College or University. But sometimes and I’ve heard these phone calls. She’s getting calls from people hundreds of kilometres away that are in a hospital about to be discharged after being beaten by their trafficker, saying, I just need a way to get out of here. Can you help me? Can you call the police, get them to my hospital room? Can you figure out a way to get somebody to come and get me? I just want to come home. I don’t want to be in X-Y-Z City. And this is the kind of work she does.

She knows everybody working on what she calls the tracks. These are strips of roads that are frequented by prostitutes and prostituted women. And she knows who’s there because they want to be. But she knows what their issues are, and she tries to help them. If they can’t leave, she tries to at least make sure that they have sanitary products, that they’ve had food, because a lot of times the traffickers don’t care if they’ve eaten, they don’t care if they haven’t had access to a tampon.

The work that she does, I’ve never seen anybody so committed to one cause. And she’s an absolutely brilliant and brave woman. She pulls girls out of motel rooms. That’s the kind of woman that she is.

Jordan To sort of Zoom out from the horrifying picture on the ground and try to grapple with this problem at scale. How national is this, I don’t know, industry? If we want to call it that. I mean, you guys spent time tracking a website that I was shocked to see is like blatantly advertising these women.

Cristina Oh, yeah. They’re not going to say that they’re being trafficked. These ads cost money to post. And we went through ads just over a six month period. And I would see the same women in Winnipeg and I would see that face a couple of weeks later in Ottawa. And then I would see them a couple of weeks later in Montreal or a couple of days later in Montreal. And these women are working a circuit. So most often the circuit is Windsor or Niagara or Sarnia all the way out to Montreal. But the higher end trafficking or traffickers will fly women and girls out to locations.

So a massive conference, for example, in Winnipeg. And Winnipeg may have a shortage of sex workers, so they’ll say you’re going out there for a couple of weeks and they’ll put them on a plane and know that they won’t escape because they are too scared to. Or they will rent them a car with a credit card that is in the victim’s name as they’re racking up charges on there that nobody will be able to pay. And they’ll make sure that they get there. They’ll drive them there. It’s a massive issue.

The Centre to End Human Trafficking actually has several different maps, and they show these different circuits. And certainly there’s a lot happening in Alberta, for example. There’s a lot of people that are without their families that are working in Fort McMurray, for example. And that’s part of a big circuit going from Fort Mac down to Edmonton, maybe even heading out to Calgary, heading back up to Grand Prairie and then back into Fort Mac. You see from Thunder Bay to Winnipeg is a massive track. Certainly in the East Coast, you’re looking at this Nova Scotia, New Brunswick run going back and forth between Halifax and Moncton. Quebec City, all the way down to Windsor.

It’s happening all across Canada, and it’s not happening the way that even I would have thought it was happening walking into this. We think of, like, dingy hotels. These are not women that are handcuffed to a bed, like in movies like Taken. But these are happening in, like, high end hotels. These are happening in Airbnbs and posh condos. These are happening in residential neighbourhoods where people rent out a basement apartment, or part of a home or like a duplex or even a whole home and just have a stable of women that are servicing men against their choice.

Jordan Here comes my big question that I’m sure you’ve explored. I’m sure it’s a very complex answer. But you’ve got women like Caroline and Megan doing this work, we’re seeing where it is. It doesn’t seem like it’s that much in the shadows anymore. What are the police doing? Why aren’t they more involved? What do they say when you push them on a kind of dismal record of arresting these people and convicting them?

Megan They say that it’s hard. They say that it’s tough to find traffickers because you need victims to come forward. They say that, for example, when we were doing this, they said that they had to stop doing John stings because it was during Covid, and they had a responsibility to keep the Johns safe. The best way to combat human trafficking is to use the laws. And this is what I’m hearing from all of the advocates, is to use the laws that are in front of them. And charging sex purchasers makes it easier for them to reduce demand. Because if you know that buying a woman for sex could or has a high likelihood of resulting in you being charged and that being something that you now have to deal with at work or at home, with your spouse or within your friend group or family, you’re less likely to do it.

They want to see more charges there. Police say that they can’t do those charges because of covid. Now, we know that some cities have had better results, but when it comes to trafficking, it is a tough job to police it, and my heart goes out to police officers that are really trying to combat it because you really do need to have a victim or somebody that sees it happening report it. The problem is we have a lot of places, despite good training that’s happening, like in the hotels and motels, a lot of places that just turn a blind eye to it, because making sure that that room is filled and paid for is more important.

So, for example, we were speaking with the hotel’s front desk manager and his reluctance to call the police, that’s concerning. Because it wasn’t just me going in as just a civilian. It’s somebody that has lots of experience in this area and she really had been vocal about that. They really are dependent on truckers and Uber drivers and hotel managers and restaurateurs to report what they see, because we can’t put the onus on victims. They’re too scared. They have too much to lose by going forward. They have everything to gain by coming forward. But it is a very difficult thing to do. They’re bound by invisible handcuffs, the fear, the violence, the threats. It’s very much like dealing with somebody that’s a victim of domestic violence. They’re really bound to their trafficker.

And so it almost becomes like the onus is on police to do better and to frequent and to check out hotels and motels where they know this stuff is happening. But also on business owners that see irregular activities that see a girl that’s going in or lots of foot traffic to one room, or a girl that might be brought in or somebody being brought in, in what appears to be against their will, that doesn’t have ID on them. That somebody else is paying for the room and then leaving, even though they paid with a credit card in that person’s name. There’s a lot of signs that these businesses can look out for, and if they report it to the police, the police will have better success.

Jordan So how can listeners to this podcast or viewers of the documentary help? I mean, maybe first of all, you’ve given us some of the ones from a hotel/motel perspective. What are the signs that we should watch for? And what’s the best course of action? Not just calling the police, but just in general. How can people help?

Cristina One of the easiest things to do is to just reach out to the person that you may think could be in trouble. It might just be somebody saying, hey, are you okay? Because that might be that one person that they go, ‘no, I need help’. And you might be having to ask at the exact right moment, where the trafficker has gone for a couple of hours, and it’s good to go. You really should be looking for, a lot of people have all of these different signs, but it’s not so dramatic. A lot of times it’s just women and girls lured from cash registers at a store that they work at, where the guy’s promising them things, or found online through Facebook and Snapchat and Twitter and Instagram, like, very basic social media things.

So it really comes down to if the woman or girl all of a sudden starts coming home with expensive things, parents should be flagged. They should be looking at that saying, ‘where did they get the money for this?’ Because a lot of times, that’s part of the grooming process. If they start to become withdrawn. I’m speaking now for families and friends, if they start to become withdrawn and very overtly connected to this one new man that’s come in and has quickly devoured all of their attention, particularly if he’s older, and I’m speaking about teens now. They should at least be a little bit concerned and be paying attention.

But if you see women and girls walking around with bruises, walking around that you know that they haven’t eaten, you could just tell. People that look like they don’t want to be there all the time. These are things that need to be looked for, lack of social media activity, big charges on credit cards. There’s a lot of little signs that don’t always lead to the person being trafficked, but when you look at them as a whole, it’s pretty easy. But really, it could be as simple as asking the person if they were okay or even calling the Centre to End Human trafficking’s hotline.

Because you don’t have to be a victim. You could just report it and find out what they think. To see what they believe should be your next steps.

Jordan That’s great advice, Cristina. Thank you for that. Thank you for all your work on this. And thank you to Megan and Caroline and all the people that talked to you.

Cristina Thank you, Jordan.

Jordan Cristina Howorun of City News. You can watch Fighting Traffick on City News stations across the country at 10:00 p.m. tonight, except in Central Time, where it airs at 9:00 p.m.

That was The Big Story. For more from us, we are at thebigstorypodcast.ca . We are on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN. You can email us at theBigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com [click here!]. And of course, you can find us in every podcast player, and you can ask your smart speaker to ‘play the Big Story Podcast’.

Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow. Back to top of page