Bill No. 173 - Education Act and Education (CSAP) Act. - Second Reading

CLAUDIA CHENDER « » : I thank my colleagues for their comments and for bringing this bill in. We in the NDP caucus recognize the danger posed by human trafficking and sexual exploitation. I think those challenges have been enumerated pretty clearly so far in this conversation. To put some numbers to it, we know that there were 63 incidents reported in the last seven years, and 58 of those were from Halifax. Certainly, as urban MLAs, we are acutely and particularly aware of this issue.

We need to educate ourselves, without question, about what these risks are. The member for Halifax Atlantic was talking about video games. I think I have now given up calling myself young, with some sadness, and I'm not. I have no idea what the universe that my children are facing is now or will be, so I certainly think that it's incumbent upon all of us to keep our ear to the ground and to be as knowledgeable as possible about the risks facing youth, particularly vulnerable youth.

Dialogue on this issue is needed. We won't get anywhere if we don't talk about it, and certainly in that vein curriculum is important. I would suggest, and it probably won't come as a surprise to anyone, that as a government where we can be most useful in this conversation is by addressing the factors that make people vulnerable to human trafficking.

It's not to take anything away from this bill but, as we've heard, we know that traffickers specifically target poor and marginalized communities. We know, as the member for Halifax Atlantic mentioned and I've had those same conversations with folks at the YWCA, traffickers target children living in group homes, children who are socially isolated, and children who are poor. So those are the conditions that we as legislators, I would suggest, have to attend to in order to think about how we can reduce that vulnerability index of people.

So, as we have been talking about this session, and forever, that includes things like affordable housing, that includes situations like child poverty, that includes food insecurity. It's really important, these aren't abstract issues. The idea of not being able to buy food means you have to find the food somewhere, and you have to find a way to pay for the food. These are exactly the kinds of entreaties that can lead children down an awful path, and, of course, not just children.

Racism and colonialism also contribute to the marginalization of people, particularly the Indigenous populations. Nova Scotians who experience racism face systemic barriers. And again these ongoing roadblocks, these ongoing challenges, challenges which often include access to credit, access to the ability to pay for basic needs, puts these communities at a higher risk of being trafficked.

In that vein I would suggest addressing systems and practices like street checks, other persistent structural disadvantages in justice, education, health and other areas, some of which we recently discussed that are enumerated in the DPAD Report, Count Us In. All of those suggestions, all of those goals that the government has committed itself to, laudably I would suggest, are directly related to this issue.

We need to create the conditions for people to be self-reliant, to be resilient, and to not find themselves in desperate and vulnerable situations that open them up to these kinds of situations.

Similarly, I would say that persistent gender inequality also increases this vulnerability. We still have gender-based disparity of opportunity and income. With that are all the structural barriers that women in this Chamber, for as long as we've been in this Chamber and elsewhere before that, have been talking about. We are paid less for equal work - not in here, luckily. We continue to be disproportionately responsible for unpaid work, I would suggest, probably some of us in here. I think the logical conclusion of that in many cases is there is still a gender binary and a gender expectation of submissiveness. This is why women are trafficked more than men. I would say that proactively addressing some of these issues, again, can reduce vulnerability and build resilience.

In short, human trafficking and sexual exploitation thrive in communities where large numbers of individuals are socially and economically marginalized and don't have access to the supports and services that they need. Progressive, adequately funded health and social services, a well-rounded public education system that supports social justice and actively challenges colonialism, racism, sexism - all the systems of oppression - are key in addressing these issues.

I thought it was really interesting what the member for Halifax Atlantic said when he was talking about educating his children at such a young age about these issues that we often think of as taboo.

I think a lot of us when we were kids may never even have had the talk with our parents because our parents couldn't deal with having the talk. Now, I think as parents, hopefully we're all a little bit more enlightened than that. The talk now is about so much more; we're not just talking about human sexuality, we're talking about all of the perils that are not just presented by the guy in the van, who was also the guy that I was taught to be afraid of as a child, but maybe by the guy on the other end of the video screen.

I think we all have to find our way through this together, certainly. I think particularly those folks in the public service working in education, in health care, in justice, need to attend to these situations. I would suggest that when we look at the victims of human trafficking, their profiles would not suggest that they have high social indicators of health, social cohesion, income, and so I think these are the things we need to attend to.

We need to attend to it on both sides of the scale. We need to educate our children and - I think back to this Act - yes, sure, it should be a part of the curriculum but more importantly it should just be a part of the conversation, and so I think we need to find ways of understanding what that conversation looks like.

As a parent, as an MLA, I confess that I don't know exactly what that conversation looks like. I mean, I think it looks like, for me and for our caucus, attending to those folks on the front lines who really understand these issues and who can give a clear sense of the causalities and how they unroll. The member for Dartmouth East talked about hearing from people first-hand, and the member for Halifax Atlantic and I have also had an opportunity to talk to the YWCA. I would echo support for those folks working on the front lines of this.

The YWCA is sort of the penultimate example in our community. Charlene Gagnon, who lives in Dartmouth, runs their anti-trafficking initiatives. They have a Safe Spaces Program. To my prior point, the YWCA's Safe Spaces Program: the first thing they initiated in that program was emergency housing because they acknowledge that one of the, if not the primary, concerns of people attempting to flee human trafficking is that they don't have a safe place to live. That's not just an issue for people who are being trafficked, that's an issue for all kinds of Nova Scotians. But in this case in particular, the Safe Spaces Program, which provides emergency housing, is an excellent and important program.

I know the YWCA in particular employs lots of people who have been in these situations themselves, have been in communities where these situations occur, have the understanding, the skill and the trauma-informed approaches to really be connecting with people. To that end, on the radio this morning was an educator talking about this bill and one of the points she made, which I thought was really interesting, was: it's important to talk about it, and I need to talk about this with my students, but I know there are other teachers who pinch hit for me who don't know how to talk about this and who don't want to talk about this because they can't, they don't know how.

I would suggest that if this kind of initiative were to go forward, hand in hand should be professional development. I think we've talked at other times in this Chamber about the need for more trauma-informed knowledge among our educators, and that's not through any fault of our educators. But, again, I think with the ever-rapidly evolving and sometimes scary-ways world that we live in, there is a need for teachers to be equipped to handle all kinds of things that we never thought teachers needed to handle before. So, I would suggest that kind of education would be an offering that we could make to our educators.

In closing, in terms of this bill, as I said at the outset, I think we do need dialogue and I think this bill captures some of that. In particular I would say that any situation of exploitation depends upon secrecy and some degree of misinformation in order to be successful. So the degree to which we can eliminate that secrecy, to which we can provide robust, clear, helpful, compassionate, trauma-informed information to young people - 100 per cent we're behind it, but as I've said, I think we also need to do so much more.