BC Gets It Wrong on Human Trafficking

It’s baffling that governments seem to think giving police more money will somehow magically solve problems.

The latest example is the B.C. government’s funding for a 12-officer RCMP unit to combat human trafficking — an announcement that came in the same week The Tyee reported on the closure of PACE Society, which has provided services to sex workers in Vancouver for 31 years.

Human trafficking takes many forms, from forced labour to sexual exploitation. When it comes to vulnerable people being coerced into sex work, organizations like PACE are much more likely to identify cases of trafficking and provide help than police.

Human trafficking is terrible, depriving people of their rights and forcing them into work, often under exploitive conditions.

It is also, based on the evidence, relatively rare. A Statistics Canada study found there were 4,543 reported cases between 2013 and 2023, or about 450 a year. Across B.C., there were 43 reported cases in 2023, with 28 cases in Vancouver and four in Victoria.

The provincial government and advocates have argued for years that cases are underreported, but numbers have not increased despite a range of initiatives.

Statistics Canada also found that police interventions were ineffective. In cases reported by police between 2013 and 2023, only one in 10 resulted in a guilty verdict. The overwhelming — 84 per cent — of adult criminal court cases involving human trafficking charges resulted in a stay, a withdrawal, a dismissal or a discharge.

So why choose more police as the solution?

It’s been a failed approach for decades. In a 2007 column, I wrote about a major operation in which Lower Mainland police pooled their resources and dozens of officers swooped down on 18 massage parlours in one night. The goal, police said, was to protect the women working in them and fight the risk of human trafficking.

But the 78 women being “protected” were led away in handcuffs and taken to police departments. Police found all were at least 21 and in the country legally. None of them were charged. In fact, no one was charged and most of the businesses reopened.

Beyond scaring the women and getting initially positive headlines, the raids accomplished nothing.

People who are being trafficked — in whatever form — have no reason to trust the police and lots of good reasons to mistrust them.

Traffickers exploit people who live in the shadows — without legal status or other survival options or vulnerable in some other way. Public Safety Canada notes Indigenous women and girls, migrants and new immigrants, kids in government care, workers without legal status and poor people are among potential victims.

And those people are all more likely to consider police a threat than an ally.

Which raises serious questions about whether giving more money to the RCMP for the province’s new initiative makes sense.

The province is already providing the RCMP with $620 million a year on policing in the province.

Perhaps the money going to the RCMP’s new human trafficking operation would be better spent supporting organizations that worked directly with the people most likely to be victims.

Organizations that work with temporary foreign workers, for example, or migrant populations or sex workers or children and youth in government care.

Those organizations can build trust and support victims, and involve police when it is appropriate.

It’s easier for governments to hand money over to police forces, like the RCMP. Their large organizations include research and communications and admin staff who can make the case for more money and comply with reporting requirements. Police are guaranteed ongoing funding and can make multi-year plans.

While non-profits that work with potential victims of trafficking scrabble together short-term government funding, donations and grants and other sources. They operate year to year with no guarantee funding will be renewed.

Their volunteer boards don’t have ready access to cabinet ministers or political clout — especially compared with police chiefs, who are skilled in letting no crisis, real or perceived, go to waste when it comes to getting more money for their departments. In B.C., the two major associations of chiefs of police are even exempted from reporting their lobbying efforts, while non-profits are not.

It’s a system that makes it easy for politicians to see more spending on police as the solution to a problem. But easy is not the same as effective.

Everyone should hope the new RCMP unit produces results.

But mostly this looks like a missed opportunity to make real progress.