Fate of Insite Unknown
by Meghan Roberts
Vancouver’s safe injection site (Insite) has been a hotbed of controversy since opening three years ago. The most recent research indicates that the site is beneficial both to its patrons and the Vancouver community, however, the conflicting ideological views of the BC and Federal governments continue to threaten its future.
Insite provides a safe atmosphere and clean equipment for persons with drug addictions. There are over 60 safe injection sites primarily in Western Europe and most recently Australia. Vancouver’s site is the first of its kind in North America.
“I’ve traveled to Ottawa several times to advocate for the continuation of the safe injection Site,” said Vancouver mayor Sam Sullivan, “I hope my efforts have had a role in convincing the federal government to continue the site.”
Tony Clement, federal minister of health, remains skeptical of Insite despite his recent visit to the facility on January 3, 2007. The tour came as a surprise to the Insite staff, who were not expecting the high profile visitor. Both staff and Insite users were present during Clement’s 30-minute tour.
Clement did not reveal the impact of this visit on his views of the site, but said that it was educational. He has yet to decide Insite’s fate beyond the end of this year.
Jeff West, an employee and advocate of Insite, is passionate that it has been beneficial both to its patrons and the community. But he is concerned about the potential closure of the site if the Conservative Party manages to seize power as a majority government.
West also mentioned United States influence on Canadian policies, citing the US War on Drugs as a source of dissent in Canada for a project like Insite.
He is adamant that community harm reduction is a major goal of Insite, and that a regulated space brings drug usage out of the public eye.
“Amongst this population the first thing you have to do is treat them with dignity, passion and respect and break down their selfloathing,” he said.
Evan Wood, assistant professor in the UBC Department of Medicine and principal investigator for the study of Insite, was involved in its founding through his work at the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS. Wood helped with feasibility research for the site and worked with Vancouver Coastal Health to obtain the exemption necessary to operate an organisation facilitating persons addicted to illegal substances.
Wood’s research concludes that the site is highly beneficial to its patrons and the Vancouver community. Patrons who visit the site regularly were shown to have an increased likelihood of entering a detoxification program; in addition, shared usage of needles in the Downtown Eastside has decreased; users are practicing safer injecting techniques, and there have been fewer overdoses among Insite users.
Perry Kendall, Provincial Health Officer for British Columbia’s Ministry of Health and chair of the project’s steering committee, wrote on behalf of Vancouver Coastal Health requesting a 3.5-year extension based on the encouraging results of the research that has been conducted.
“Multiply 700 by 365 and that’s how many injections would be happening on the street [per year] if the site closes,” Kendall said.
The federal government has cut select funding to the project and denied Insite’s request for a 3.5-year extension to operate in favour of one that will last until the end of 2007. Wood links this lack of enthusiasm to the proximity of the USA and ideological conflicts.
“Results are black and white and crystal clear,” Wood stated. “[The] Conservative government has chosen to ignore these findings in pursuit of their ideological agenda.”
“I think it’s appalling,” said Wood, who believes that this set back will halt development of similar sites in other Canadian cities, potentially resulting in avoidable medical care costs and loss of human life.
Originally published on the front cover of the Ubyssey Newspaper on January 30th, 2007
http://www.ubyssey.ca/
What is, and what should never be: Human Trafficking in Canada
by Meghan Roberts
It seems far fetched to regard slavery as a significant problem in modern society, yet slavery is not only active, it’s flourishing in ways one never thought possible.
The practice of trafficking is a well-known modern crime that is most often associated with drugs and illegal weapons. However a new commodity has been gaining popularity and is in constant international demand: humans.
The United Nations broadly defines human trafficking as the recruitment, transportation and harboring of humans for exploitative purposes. Exploitation is the key factor to any human trafficking case. This crime against humanity is rampant across the globe but has recently been appearing more frequently in Canadian media and slowly attracting the attention of the Canadian public.
Internationally and in Canada, the trafficking of human beings represents a multi-million dollar market. The United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (UNODCCP) estimates that human trafficking brings in five to seven billion dollars annually under the direction of criminal trafficking organizations. The US Department of Justice has an increased estimation of ten billion. In Canada, human trafficking is accountable for 120 to 400 million dollars, with anywhere between 8,000 and 16,000 affected immigrants. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Intelligence Directorate believes that up to 2,200 individuals are smuggled from Canada to the United States annually. Similarly, RCMP officials determined that approximately 600 women and children enter Canada as trafficking victims destined solely for Canada’s sex trade; for all domestic markets, the number of trafficked victims is believed to be at least 800.
There are four centres of trafficking activity in Canada: Toronto, Ontario; Vancouver, British Columbia; Montreal, Quebec; and Winnipeg, Manitoba. The diversity of these four cities is representative of the epidemic nature of human trafficking. Canadian trafficking is not concentrated in one province or city but occurs across Canada from coast to coast and is controlled predominantly by biker gangs. Ethnic patterns can be detected in each trafficking center, though victims come from a multitude of nations. In Montreal the trafficked individuals are extremely diverse and no group is prevalent. Trafficked Eastern European and Latin American individuals are found in multitudes on the streets of Toronto. Winnipeg, with one of the largest urban populations of Aboriginals in Canada, has the most internally trafficked Aboriginal women and girls. Finally, the majority of victims in Vancouver are Asian, particularly those of Chinese and Filipino descent.
The victims of human trafficking are copious and varied. Most often young women are trafficked from Asian nations or Eastern European countries that were formally part of the Soviet Union. These women are scrupulously recruited and then shipped to foreign countries to work as virtual slaves. Aboriginal Canadian women and girls, primarily from northern reserves in British Columbia, the Prairies and Quebec, are lured away and sent to Canadian trafficking hot spots, as well as other countries, including Mexico and Japan. Canadian children have been trafficked and sold for adoption or into the sex trade in Ontario and the Prairies.
Any individual can be a potential trafficking victim. Traffickers tend to search for individuals who are vulnerable in some aspect, particularly those who live in hopeless poverty and are desperate to provide for themselves and their families. Poverty is the most important and dominant feature of trafficking victims; however there are a multitude of situational circumstances that traffickers capitalize on, including social crisis, age, education, gender, and drug and alcohol addiction.
These victims experience new levels of exploitation. Trafficking victims both internationally and nationally are dominantly used as sex trade workers. They are forced into positions as strippers and dancers in nightclubs. Many face prostitution on the streets, in brothels or houses, and in barely legal massage parlours. Trafficking victims are also used for domestic work and forced labour. In British Columbia, Canada and Idaho, USA there exist polygamous communities of extremist Mormons. Individuals in such communities have reportedly obtained trafficked women and forced them into marriage agreements.
Traffickers use numerous recruitment strategies to ensnare unsuspecting victims. On the international front, employment agencies and recruitment agents feign professionalism, while other traffickers use their personal contacts to connect with potential victims or place ads for false jobs in local newspapers. In Canada, victims are primarily deceived by individuals they know personally. Traffickers form trusting relationships with their victims before submitting them to the horrors of trafficking.
Recruitment is made easier by international prostitution circuits that stretch across Canada and the world. Canadian and American nightclubs are reported to stay in close contact with one another and several of the above mentioned employment agencies. Canada is not home to major trafficking networks similar to those across seas, but Canadian traffickers are evidently in contact with such international networks. Within Canada and the United States there exist several trafficking circuits that span across Toronto, Ontario; Montreal, Quebec; New York, New York; Seattle, Washington; Vancouver, British Columbia; and Edmonton, Alberta. There are also large circuits between Vancouver and New York, and Vancouver and northern Canadian towns such as Prince Rupert. The recruitment of Canadian victims has reportedly taken place in bus shelters and depots, rural villages, and malls, but can occur at any location.
When victims arrive at their destination countries or cities they are informed that they owe a debt to their traffickers. Traffickers often charge victims $5,000 to $10,000 US plus the cost of travel and any other fees that are a result of the victim’s transfer. Trafficking victims are kept under close surveillance and controlled through the use of physical abuse and threats against the victims and their families until they are rescued or have paid in full.
Canada, like the rest of the world, has insufficient resources and law enforcement to deal with the astronomical quantity of humans trafficked each year. The majority of international trafficking victims are treated as illegal immigrants and quickly detained and deported. Steps in law and legislature have been taken in the right direction, including the allowance of a temporary residence permit for trafficking victims. In addition, the Canadian Criminal Code was updated last year to include new offences in the sphere of human trafficking.
The trafficking of human beings is a blatant disregard of human rights. It is modern day slavery, yet virtually unknown to the world. The silence surrounding the issue of human trafficking is truly deafening, and only by informing one another can we hope to make progress. For more information or to get involved, please visit http://www.humantrafficking.org/.
Sources
“Human smuggling/trafficking: The trade in people”. CBC News Online. Apr. 13 2006. Aug. 18. 2006. http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/crime/human-smuggling.html.
Canadian Press. “Hundreds of foreigners lured in sex trade: RCMP”. CTV.ca. Dec. 7 2004. Aug. 18. 2006. http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1102374833143_11/?hub=Canada.
Bzowy, Melissa and Wankel, Mallory. “Modern slavery: women and the new world of exploitation”. The Varsity Online. Jan. 12. 2004. Aug. 18. 2006. http://www.thevarsity.ca/media/storage/paper285/news/2004/01/12/Feature/Modern.Slavery.Women.And.The.New.World.Of.Exploitation-579648.shtml?norewrite200608191905&sourcedomain=www.thevarsity.ca.
“Organized Crime in Canada: A Quarterly Summary”. Nathanson Centre for the Study of Organized Crime and Corruption. Apr. 2006. Aug. 18. 2006. http://www.yorku.ca/nathanson/CurrentEvents/2006_Q2.htm#Human%20Smuggling.
“Interdepartmental Working Group on Trafficking in Persons (IWGTIP)”. Department of Justice Canada. Jun. 13. 2006. Aug. 18. 2006. http://www.justice.gc.ca/en/fs/ht/iwgtip.html.
Originally published in Five Minutes to Midnight in September 2006 http://www.i2r.org/fmm/index.shtml
Invisible Canada – Canadian Film Abroad
By Meghan Roberts
Undergraduate student Dax Sorrenti explores international perception of David Cronenberg’s film Eastern Promises.
Sorrenti, a film studies major, is using the popular movie to gauge international opinion of Canadian film. For his research, he studied reviews to see if they mentioned any Canadian elements.
“It’s a study of contemporary Canadian cinema and how it’s being received outside Canada,” Film Studies Professor Ernest Mathijs, the instigator of the projector, explained.
“Eastern Promises is the first one we’re looking at. We’ve already started to look at Juno, which has a lot of Canadian input, as a mirror example.”
Both Sorrenti and Mathijs have noticed that the “Canadianness” of a film tends to be overlooked in movies that do not fit a certain genre.
“A lot of reviews find it important to mention a film is from Hollywood,” Mathijs explained, “but they don’t find it important to mention it’s Canadian unless it fits a certain aesthetic; like an American film but more weird.”
“One thing that’s glaringly obvious is that the Canadianness gets brushed under the rug,” Sorrenti agreed, “Cronenberg mentions the invisible Canada. Canada is this invisible film industry that’s out there and the films are doing well, but they’re muddled with the Hollywood system.”
Sorrenti got involved in the project after his performance in Mathijs’ film theory class.
“He stood out,” Mathijs said, “He knows the film industry and how to get his hands on to proper sources.”
Mathijs explained that he has always found working with undergraduate students very rewarding. “As you get older they give you a fresher perspective,” he laughed.
Sorrenti was also given the opportunity to present his research at the 2008 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, hosted at UBC this June.
“Everyone was really friendly and had mutual respect,” Sorrenti said, “It was definitely cool to do before I graduated.”
The research was presented as part of a panel on which Sorrenti was the only undergraduate. An open discussion was held following the presentations.
“It was fun, less intimidating then presenting to a class,” Sorrenti said of speaking to a room full of academics. “People are there because they want to hear what you have to say; when you’re presenting in class people have to be there.”
Being able to conduct and present research has proved valuable for Sorrenti. “When you’re doing stuff for class the amount of research is tiny,” he said, “This project gave me a chance to use what I learned in school and bring it up a notch.”
“The best parts were being able to work one on one with a professor and learning the process of researching and presenting. Even if you’re not into research it gives you good skills!”
Originally published on the Centre for Arts Student Services website.
www.arts.ubc.ca/students