Invisible Chains Read Free Page B

under the Criminal Code, including conspiring to procure a person to enter Canada for prostitution, conspiring to direct or take a person to a common bawdy house (i.e., a brothel), and two counts of keeping a bawdy house and living off the avails of prostitution.
    Human trafficking had not yet been made an offence in the Criminal Code, so Lee could not be charged with that more serious crime. He spent one evening in custody and the following day was released on bail. Two years later, while Lee’s case was still making its way through the justice system, Crown prosecutor David Torske told a Calgary court that an “equipment malfunction” had damaged key wiretap evidence implicating Lee in the sale of the Asian women. And since none of the victims were available as witnesses—they’d either been deported or disappeared—all of the charges against Lee, except one, were dropped.
    When fines are mere business expenses
    In March 2006, Lee pleaded guilty to the only remaining charge: keeping a common bawdy house. Prosecutor Torske told the court that Lee was engaged in “a modern form of slavery,” yet the sentence handed down by Justice Bob Wilkins was a paltry fine of ten thousand dollars. Moreover, Lee was given two and a half years to come up with the money.
    Calgary police estimated that each woman exploited in the massage parlour scheme could bring in up to ten thousand dollars per month. On that basis Lee’s punishment was nothing more than a business expense, and a petty one at that. In effect, it was like buying a city permit rather than receiving a proportionate penalty for committing a serious crime.
    Lee’s accomplice and girlfriend, Noi Saengchanh, was a thirty-three-year-old Thai woman with a sixth-grade education who in October 1998 had entered Canada illegally under a false name. Prostituted in Thailand, she drew on her knowledge of the sex trade, joining the other side of the “business” as a facilitator of human trafficking. In July 2004, Saengchanh pleaded guilty to three prostitution-related offences and was sentenced by Justice Catherine Skene of the Alberta Provincial Court to two years imprisonment. After serving one-third of her sentence, she was released and deported back to her native Thailand.
    Operation Relaxation did more than confirm that human trafficking could occur in a typical Canadian neighbourhood. It also demonstrated how Canada was ill-equipped to confront modern-day slavery in its own backyard.
    â€œThis was before human trafficking was really on the radar,” says Detective Brooks. “We had a great opportunity to further this investigation, going even so far as to get an undercover operator to Thailand. Unfortunately, there was an issue around cost and jurisdiction. We met with the RCMP a bunch of times, trying to facilitate this whole thing. It was frustrating. And it never worked out.”
    Staff Sergeant Houben tried to describe the scope of the problem, and the challenge of dealing with it, to the media. “This is the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “It takes a more determined and broader investigation rather than local police forces. It’s very difficult [for us] to focus on federal issues. We concentrate on our own turf.”
    Traffickers and the men who pay to abuse these victims know all too well about the lack of police coordination in confronting this crime, and they use every means available to exploit the situation. Soon after Operation Relaxation and its achievements became public knowledge, several online discussion boards warned men who frequent massage parlours to avoid them in Calgary for a while, recommending that such patrons “go to Edmonton” instead.
    Operation Relaxation opened the eyes of law enforcement officials and the courts to the realization that human trafficking can occur anywhere. It also exposed the renaissance of “new” forms of slavery, more clandestine than the