Invisible Chains Read online

  Most shocking of all was my discovery of a key reason behind such inadequate punishment against the perpetrators: Until 2005, there was no Criminal Code offence of human trafficking.

  By the time Operation Relaxation was complete and its discoveries made public, I had abandoned my plans for a business career in favour of the law. Working within the legal system appeared to be the most effective method of dealing with modern-day slavery and, perhaps, would afford a means of healing the scars I had acquired from my time in Cambodia.

  In 2006, after spending more than a year and a half seeking answers from the federal government about Canada’s failure to protect trafficking victims—as it had 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 permits to 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

  On 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 visas enabling the women to enter Canada. Once they’d arrived, the women were forced to hand over their travel documents, which were destroyed to prevent anyone from tracing their identities and whereabouts.

  The traffickers covered their tracks by using bogus identification to obtain real driver’s licences for the women in British Columbia. For an average of twenty-five hundred dollars, a “Wellness Centre” in Richmond, British Columbia, issued certificates stating that the women were trained massage therapists. The fake certificates were sufficient evidence for local municipal officials to issue massage therapy licences. In Calgary alone, at least forty-three people were granted licences based on the fraudulent Wellness Centre documents.

  Once in Canada, the women were sold to massage parlour owners in Vancouver, Calgary, and other cities for between eight and fifteen thousand dollars each—not hired or employed, but instead sold.

  In the hands of her new “owner,” each woman was required to pay off a “contract” of at least forty thousand dollars to the massage parlour operator through sex acts with customers. To generate the amount needed to secure their release, the women had to service numerous men almost every day. Most of the women didn’t speak English.

  Was Cloud 9 Body Care unique or did it serve as a model for similar ventures in other areas of the city? To determine the answer, Calgary police officers went undercover as men wanting to set up their own massage parlour offering sexual services. Within a short time, they had negotiated the “purchase” of several women, along with advice from the traffickers on how to maximize their profits and minimize their problems in handling the victims.

  Any amount of money deemed appropriate, the traffickers suggested, could be imposed on the women as the price for their freedom. “We were looking at an eighty thousand dollar contract per girl before their obligations were concluded,” says Detective Cam Brooks of the Calgary Police Service. The traffickers even advised the undercover officers on how to ensure that the women did not attempt to flee or alert authorities to their situation.

  “You can’t let them go out,” the traffickers said. “You have to keep them separated so that they don’t start talking among themselves about how they can get out of this before their contract is fulfilled. You must watch their every movement.”

  Based on secretly taped conversations, police obtained arrest and search warrants to raid massage parlours implicated in the criminal network. The owners and operators of the parlours were arrested, and the women found on the premises taken into custody for questioning. As the dust settled in Calgary after the raids, questions arose about the fate of the exploited women in the massage parlours and the alleged traffickers.

  “We see these women as victims, as anyone in the sex trade is,” Staff Sergeant Joe Houben told the media. We now know, however, that the foreign women captured in the dragnet who did not have legal immigration status were detained and deported by federal officials, further traumatizing them and exposing them to the risk of re-trafficking or reprisal. The few women who were legally in Canada were released and soon vanished; police suspect they were sent to other locations in Calgary or moved to Vancouver and Toronto.

  More than fifty criminal charges were laid against twenty-eight people as a result of Operation Relaxation, but the outcome of those prosecutions is much less impressive than the number of charges suggests. Anthony Lee, a thirty-six-year-old Chinese-Canadian and the alleged owner of Cloud 9 Body Care, managed to evade police during the initial sweep. Police believed that Lee had links to organized crime in Vancouver. After a forty-one-day manhunt, Lee turned himself in to police, who charged him with
a series of offences 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.

  “This 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 traditional slavery practised in many regions of the world through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but just as loathsome and dehumanizing.

  A slave in wartime Africa and peaceful Canada

  The evil of the new slavery can only be fully assessed through the experiences of its victims, one of whom is Thérèse.

  For almost half of her life, Thérèse was a slave. She grew up in the Democratic Republic of the Congo during a civil war that various human rights groups have labelled a “war against women.” Parties in the conflict perpetuated the war by recruiting young boys as child soldiers and forcing girls to become “bush wives.” Sexual violence commonly was used to terrorize the population and destroy families. At fourteen, Thérèse became a casualty of this war when her family sold her to traffickers, and for the next eleven years she was forced to provide sex acts to hordes of men.

  “She was basically a commodity, sold from one person to another person through all those years,” says Sherilyn Trompetter, assistant executive director of Changing Together, an Edmonton-basednon-governmental organization (NGO) that helps immigrant women. “Since she was a young child, she did not have control over any aspect of her life.”

  Thérèse’s trafficker controlled five other women, two of whom he eventually beat to death. At one point, Thérèse became pregnant and gave birth to a baby who, when just three months old, was taken away, never to be seen again.

  Thérèse’s “owner” eventually realized that he could profit more from her exploitation in North America than in Africa, so at twenty- five she was brought to Canada with two other women to be sold for sex. Ironically, a country that continues to pride itself on its role in supporting the Underground Railroad for freed slaves of African origin in the nineteenth century had, by the early twenty-first century, become an attractive destination for traffickers in slaves from the same continent.

  In Thérèse’s case, however, the move to Canada proved advantageous. Shortly after arriving here in April 2008, she gathered the courage to escape when her trafficker let her use a public washroom. The other women who were brought to Canada with Thérèse weren’t so fortunate—authorities appear unable to find them.

  New versus Old Slavery

  The slave trade has been illegal in Canada and the rest of the British Empire since 1807, when the U.K. Parliament passed An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade after a twenty-year campaign led by William Wilberforce. First elected to Parliament at the age of twenty-one, Wilberforce is the subject of an extraordinary story told two centuries later in the film Amazing Grace. The title comes from the hymn written by John Newton, himself a former slave trader who became a passionate proponent of abolishing slavery—an “abolitionist.”

  Under international law, slavery is defined as “the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.” More simply, a person treated as property constitutes a slave to be sold, traded, used, abused, and disposed of. International law takes slavery seriously. A slave trader can be prosecuted anywhere in the world that he or she is apprehended, regardless of where the crime took place.

  Treating people as property offends our most deeply held beliefs in human liberty. On that basis alone, ending human trafficking deserves to be a priority for modern governments. Too often, though, advocates for better laws prohibiting the practice and calling for stiff penalties against those convicted of human trafficking are treated as though they are trapped in the eighteenth century.

  The cruel reality is that slavery continues to exist, albeit in an evolved form. Author and researcher Kevin Bales has even estimated that more people are in bondage today than during any other period in history. While many factors distinguish these old and new species of slavery, the catastrophic impact on the lives of the victims has changed little.

  For example, “Old Slavery” owners paid high costs to acquire their slaves and earned relatively low profits from their labour. In contrast, “New Slavery” owners avoid legal ownership but earn high profits from slaves whose cost is often minimal. During the period of Old Slavery, owners usually provided at least basic necessities for their slaves in hope of reaping profit from their labour over the long term. With New Slavery, the exploitative relationship is comparatively shorter, the slaves are considered disposable, and the care
they receive is minimal, if any. Finally, ethnic differences were important to slave owners of yesteryear. Today, ethnic origin is not important—slavery has become an “equal opportunity” form of exploitation.

  Despite these distinctions between Old and New Slavery, some fundamental similarities remain: the targeting of disadvantaged individuals to reap ill-gotten financial rewards, the resistance of profiteers to exposing these systems of exploitation, the complicity of governments either through corruption or inaction, and the crucial role of individuals and civil society in championing its abolition.

  Shock and outrage are often the first reactions from people in Canada and throughout much of the rest of the world who bear witness to human trafficking. Arousing a sense of determination and effective action to address human trafficking is more challenging. In some cases, as in Canada until very recently, no law specifically identified human trafficking as a criminal offence. To deal with the problem, some jurisdictions dusted off old anti-slavery laws as a means of convicting contemporary traffickers, proving, among other things, that our society is generally uninformed about the scope and nature of the problem.

  Human trafficking is an affront to our most fundamental rights and freedoms. It destroys lives, undermines democracy, and fuels criminality. Literally a man-made disaster, it affects millions of victims worldwide, funding a lucrative global criminal enterprise.

  Most people in Canada, including me initially, assume that trafficking in humans, while it may occur within our borders, exclusively exploits newcomers whose primary objective is to make a new life in Canadian society. However, criminal investigations, including multiple cases documented in this book, are proving this assumption to be hopelessly naive. Human trafficking does not require an international border to be crossed, nor does it necessarily involve movement or transfer of the victim. Human trafficking in Canada involves the sexual exploitation and forced labour of a diverse array of victims: Canadian citizens and newcomers, adults and children, women and men.