Invisible Chains Read Free

promised to do in an international treaty—I enlisted the help of some exceptional law students to draft a report evaluating this country’s treatment of enslaved individuals. Canada got a failing grade.
    Fortunately, our report received a flurry of national and international media attention, prompting Monte Solberg, the new minister of citizenship and immigration, to promise to make the system more responsive to victims. And he did. Just two weeks later I received a telephone call from Ian Todd, his chief of staff, inviting me to join them as a senior policy adviser. Within eight weeks the minister had approved new guidelines for the treatment of trafficking victims. These guidelines granted victims temporary residence permitsto remain in Canada to help them recover and access interim federal health care and emergency counselling.
    The minister’s efforts led to the creation of a basic framework for granting foreign trafficking victims legal immigration status in recognition of their suffering at the hands of others—an important initiative, but only the first step toward shaping an effective government response.
    The word that best describes Canada’s record in dealing with human trafficking is lethargic. The United States, the European Union, and many other countries have been active in protecting victims as well as prosecuting traffickers and travelling sex offenders for at least ten to fifteen years. Scholars and public policy experts have been studying human trafficking in their own countries the world over for more than a decade, but Canada has yet to draft a comprehensive response to it within its own borders. In 2007, when I began the research for this book, not a single person had been convicted ofhuman trafficking in Canada. Only a handful of victims had been helped, and only one Canadian pedophile had been convicted under Canadian laws that make it an offence to sexually exploit children overseas.
    Yet human traffickers in Victoria, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City, Halifax, and numerous smaller cities and towns are preying upon foreign victims and Canadian citizens alike. Many of these cases are described in this book, documented with interviews by those on the front lines, along with evidence from police and government records released under the Access to Information Act. Many of these stories are being told publicly for the first time—to educate, to inform, and to inspire action that will address this hidden national tragedy.
    Beyond raising awareness, in this book I propose concrete recommendations for how Canada can become an international leader in the abolition of human trafficking—not only at all levels of government and law enforcement, but with the help of nongovernmental organizations, communities, companies, and individuals. Together we can defend freedom and end modern-day slavery.

INVISIBLE
    CHAINS

1
    THE RENAISSANCE OF SLAVERY
    O n Wednesday, November 5, 2003, immigration officials and armed police officers descended on Cloud 9 Body Care, a massage parlour just a few blocks from Rosedale Elementary and Junior High School in Calgary. The raid was part of a carefully orchestrated law enforcement mission targeting more than a dozen locations across the prairie city that chilly morning.
    The Calgary Police Service assigned the code name “Operation Relaxation” to their eighteen-month undercover investigation into massage parlours throughout the city, which began with an anonymous tip that women from Southeast Asia were being forced to sell their bodies to repay inflated debts for their travel to Canada. The women, some of whom had already been ensnared in the sex industry in their home countries, were lured with promises of a better life. A Thai woman who was living illegally in Calgary obtained travel documents from corrupt officials in the victims’ home countries, and then secured student or visitor