Thank you so much for having me.

I just found out I was going to do this late last week, so like the speaker before me, I have notes that are a little cobbled together. I hope you'll have patience.

Six minutes is not enough time, but I hope I have constructed something vaguely coherent here.

I am speaking to you from Vancouver on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.

Traditionally, for the last 20 years or so, events have been started by acknowledging the traditional lands on which we stand, which I think is a good tradition to remind us of where we are, but as non-indigenous people speaking to those who look like me, this acknowledgement needs to drive us to look further into the history of where we are. Traditional territory acknowledgement is a not-so-subtle code for stolen land, and today especially, as we discuss indigenous women and girls, it is imperative for settlers to understand how stealing land equates with the complete destabilization of indigenous people, and particularly women and girls. We need to sit with these words, clearly identifying the issues and how it feeds into the topic we will be discussing.

I want to state clearly, for the record, that I am not an indigenous woman. The father of one of my sons is from a band in [Technical difficulty—Editor], but I cannot speak from an indigenous experience. I can, however, speak to what I have lived through with my friends and their families as they invited me into their lives, as well as about the amazing people I have met all over the country as I do this work. I can speak to the abuses I saw my friends suffer at the hands of police, social workers, and men and society at large.

I'm going to quickly explain who I am. I am a survivor of government care. I was apprehended just before my 13th birthday, which was also when I was exposed to the world of trafficking and prostitution. I would get out at 28, with a total 15 years of being exploited. Some of my friends are still being sexually exploited.

So many of my friends and I started being sexually exploited as minors. I find it infuriating that there are those who wish to draw an arbitrary line—say, at 18—for when girls and women choose prostitution. I would like them to tell me what we could have accessed and how we could have gotten out of that lifestyle. Being Caucasian, I had one or two extra options, but my aboriginal friends had few, if any, options that would have saved them from the violent ongoing sexual exploitation.

We lost loved ones to a serial killer and lived through horrors I will not go into. I was a citizen journalist at the Pickton trial, and my CV can go on for quite a while.

We have a question before us, although it is written like a statement. Why is sex trafficking among indigenous people so high, when they do not make up a high percentage of the population? What if we did not look at that question, actually? We know why. Women and girls are trafficked to meet the male-driven demand for paid sex. They are more vulnerable because on their territories, or in the case of the high numbers of youth who find themselves in foster care, life can be horrible, and they [Technical difficulty—Editor].

What if we flipped the whole question and conversation and asked why we think men should be able to pay for sex? Where is the legal binding policy or human right that states that men paying for sex is a protected act? How does allowing any Canadian man to pay for sex help create a safer society for indigenous women and girls—or anyone, for that matter?

We keep sex consensual by not commodifying it, and PCEPA helps us do this.

I am a big policy law person. I quite like the finite details, so I really want to talk about the challenge to Canada's prostitution laws that's happening right now in Ontario, because it would affect not only all women but particularly indigenous women and girls. In Ontario, they would like to strike down impeding traffic, which is section 213; public communication, which is subsection 213(1.1); purchasing, which is the buying of sex; materially benefiting, or making money off the prostitution of someone else; and recruiting. They want recruiting decriminalized.

Whose neighbourhood would we have street prostitution in? I live in a poor neighbourhood. That's where they go: my neighbourhood. Whose schools or job fairs will the recruitment tables be at? Where will the billboards be? Pretty much all of the prostitution provisions they're looking at are predatory, because they rely on a third party making money recruiting, selling and advertising—a third party. Also, it's all young women, right? We're not talking about educated 40-year-old women secure in their careers; we're talking about marginalized, vulnerable youth. We need to really be thinking about that.

Now prostitution is euphemistically called being a “sugar baby” or something like that, but the core of it is the same: men taking advantage of women. Pimps and traffickers would become businessmen. If the tearing down of the Criminal Code happens, all of this will be legitimate exploitation and abuse. All these laws stop the parasitical and predatory benefiting from another's abuse. PCEPA benefited women and anyone being sold, because it changed the way they were viewed. They were supposed to get assistance.

I know that my time is done and I don't want to go over. I know there are a lot of other people. I'm just going to say two last things.

There was never a time in my friendships, which I have to this day with my friends who are indigenous, that I wasn't aware that we were treated differently because of the way we look. That's a really bad feeling, but I learned really early in life how to try to interject myself into situations, if I could, to benefit from the way I looked. Women and girls who are being exploited, who are at risk for trafficking and who live around man camps and resource extraction sites and live with that very real threat every day need intervention that benefits them, not anyone else. That's my last little item.

I know that my time here is done, but there's so much to say, so I'm going to end with this. Indigenous people—women, girls, my friends and loved ones—deserve a million times better than the way they live today. I mean, no clean water? How can we fight human trafficking if we're still fighting for water?

I want to live the rest of my life without burying one more friend. Now we are burying daughters, unfortunately.

If things don't drastically change, if indigenous people aren't given what they need to recover from the trauma that haunts them daily and given what is rightfully theirs, and if Canada does not bend to the ways of its original keepers rather than demanding adherence to colonial ways, things won't change, and I will bury more friends. That rips my heart out.

Thank you.

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