As Olympic flame burns, Canada's sex industry heats up

Canada’s sex trade industry is a complicated mess. Any time you have humans being actively bought and sold for the purposes of sexual exploitation, things tend to get a little tangled, even scandalous. Especially when it’s happening in your own backyard. A 2008 report by the Criminal Intelligence Service Canada (CISC) states that “across the country, organized crime networks are actively trafficking Canadian-born women and underage girls inter and intra-provincially, and in some instances to the United States, destined for the sex trade.” While the images of foreign women in faraway countries holed up in seedy brothels seem morally reprehensible, Canadians should be just as abhorred by images of their own women and children being trafficked within the borders of their True North Strong and Free.

Naomi Baker, from Canada Fights Human Trafficking, says that human trafficking is the fastest growing crime across the globe, with the bulk of the demand stemming from America and Canada. The North American Forum on Integration attributes this to “their more convenient and cheap location, as well as their lax legal and law enforcement systems.” Canada contributes to the demand when, according to the RCMP, 800 to 1,200 people are trafficked here every year, while there are activists placing the number as high as 15,000 annually. But don’t be too quick to place significance on numbers; organizers of the underground crime market make it their fulltime job to stay under the radar and away from traceable statistics. The fact that there is even one sexually trafficked victim within these borders is crime enough.