Joy Smith: Human Trafficking Prevention

Stuart Murray  0:00  
This podcast was recorded on the ancestral lands, on treaty one territory, the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe Cree Oji, Cree Dakota and the Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the matthi nation.

Amanda Logan (Voiceover)  0:19  
This is humans on rights, a podcast advocating for the education of human rights. Here's your host. Stuart Murray,

Stuart Murray  0:32  
human trafficking is happening in cities and towns across our country every day. At Risk. Youth and adults are manipulated and forced to participate in the sex trade or labor market. What starts out as a seemingly innocent conversation online or in real life can quickly turn into something sinister that affects lives forever. It can happen anywhere at any time. Now that is a direct quote that I've lifted off the joy Smith Foundation website, which is a fabulous website. And I'm also thrilled and delighted to welcome the founder of the joy Smith Foundation. Joy Smith, welcome to humans on rights. Joy,

Joy Smith  1:17  
great to be here today and get the word out so Joy,

Stuart Murray  1:21  
I know you. I've worked with you. I know the great work that you do, but tell the listeners a little bit about yourself, your background and how you got into this most important work that you through the joy Smith Foundation are doing. Well,

Joy Smith  1:34  
I was in it for a long time before anybody knew that I was in it because I was a teacher. I taught for 26 years, and then, of course, as you know Stuart, I ran for office provincially and then federally. I'm not a very good politician. I don't claim to be that, but by the grace of God, I landed up putting two laws at the federal level in against human traffickers that made Canadian history. They were the first of its kind. And I was so moved by this issue because of one of the students in my classroom as she all of a sudden disappeared out of class. And at that time, I was working in a high risk school. I was considered a high risk student school, and I just loved the kids, so I went and found her on our Winnipeg street around the hicken area, and she was selling herself for sex, and I kept, you know, once a week, I would go out and I'd take sandwiches and coffee and I'd give the girls on the street the sandwiches and coffee and try to persuade them to go home, try to persuade them to get off the street. And every one of them would say, we can't leave because our manager would hurt us. And they were always looking around to see who was watching them. And it was very sad. I did that for about a year, and then finally, I began to realize that this was something called human trafficking, someone who managed and controlled them, lured them into it, and then managed and control them. So I started giving seminars, because I taught grade nine at that time, and I started giving seminars on the internet and and how to protect your kids from the internet. Now, in those days, the internet, the computers were just introduced into schools. You know, kids today think that this is something that's been around forever. Well, it's relatively new, and even now, governments are trying to work out how to protect kids and the public from predators on the internet. But when I gave those talks, word would get out, and the girls who were trafficked would show up, and they just stick around until after everyone was gone, and they tell me their stories, and I'd say, well, I'll help you. My own son is a cop, I can help you. And they would say, No, no, we can't do that. And they said every time they went into court, they became not the victims of a terrible crime, but they became the bad girls. They got themselves into it. Well, just the opposite. What was happening is they were lured into it and then threatened that if they said anything, they or their siblings would be beaten or bad things would happen. It infuriated me, and I stupidly said, I'm going to leave teaching and go into and run for office and get a law in and it's going to be all. Solved. So I ran provincially first, and I realized when I got in there that wasn't the level I should be at. I should be at the federal but I lost my election, and so I thought, Well, I'm not meant to do this. I meant to go back and be a principal of a school, because I was offered that opportunity, and that's what I really wanted to be, was a principal of a school. But a whole bunch of people showed up at my door and said, would you run federally? And I looked at what I could do federally, so I agreed, and I ran in, killed on St Paul in that riding, and I was told that I wouldn't win, so I took it under advisement, and I won. And was in parliament for 12 years, and when I was there, I wasn't a very good politician, because my focus was totally on the human trafficking issue. So I, to make a long story short, mobilized Canada to support the bills. The first bill that went through was Bill c2, 68 mandatory minimums for traffickers of children 18 years and under. It's in the Criminal Code today. And then I put a second one through Bill c3, 10 mandatory minimums for traffickers. We could bring traffickers and permanent residents of Canada and citizens of Canada that went abroad to traffic, we could now bring them back to Canada for justice, because often these people would go to war torn countries or countries who had weak judicial systems, and they would, you know, prey on young girls and boys and so now we could bring them back to Canada to try them here. So those two laws were very important in opening up the issue all across our nation about human trafficking, and that's how it started. Well,

Stuart Murray  7:06  
Joy. I may take a little exception to the notion when you say you weren't a very good politician to establish and create two private members bills that you did, I mean, that is Canadian history, and the process, I'm sure, was daunting when you realize that you're passionate about this subject, you know a lot about it, but you're dealing with members from other parties who you know, as you know from time to time in politics, because you're a member of another party, they immediately want to disagree with you. And so you're able to work through all the parties, federal parties, and create the passage of two private members bills, share a little bit about that journey.

Joy Smith  7:47  
Always a horrible journey. It was a very lonely journey. I was really ostracized, and nobody believed there was human trafficking. And I credit the survivors that I worked with for 10 years before I went to Parliament, because I did that on the side when I was teaching, I credit the survivors for telling their stories. They were so brave. We got it on the Status of Women committee and did a report called Turning outrage into action. I led that report. I wasn't the chair of the committee. I would just led the report because I knew all the survivors, and I brought them in and they bravely told their stories. And I also learned something, because up until that point, I was becoming very resentful of being in Parliament, because I thought everyone had to be stupid or blind not to know about human trafficking. So as the testimonies were brought forward on committee, I saw the people who criticized me and the people who made fun of me had tears in their eyes, and I learned that they just didn't know. And I really felt terrible that I was feeling these bad thoughts against just people who were uneducated, who didn't know. And that testimony really changed things. It was that report was passed in Parliament, and we passed bill 153 I put it wasn't a bill, it was a motion. I put 153 forward after that report to the report was tabled in the House of Commons, and then I put forth motion 153 where all parliamentarians would commit to stopping human trafficking in Canada and worldwide. It was passed unanimously, but in. What they didn't know is I also had two bills, and, you know, I must say that I made friends Stuart on all sides of the house. There are good people on all sides of the house, and even people of my own party. I had a couple of MPs and a couple of senators who came to see me and said they couldn't vote for my bills, and when I they said they liked the bill, but they couldn't vote for it. So I asked them why, and they said because they serviced themselves sexually with the girls and the pro prostitution group would out them. So I said, Well, you didn't have to worry about the pro prostitution group now that you told me you have to worry about me, what I have to lose, and I wanted those bills passed. So I don't get Christmas cards from some people, but I get a lot of Chris Christmas cards from others. But anyway, so the first bill passed was great. Oh, it was horrible, but I had to rally all the service providers in Canada that worked with traffic victims, because they knew the secret was out. I rallied communities from coast to coast to coast. And the bill passed. It was the 15th private members bill that was put in the Criminal Code since Confederation. So it was a history maker, no kidding. But then I passed the second Bill, Bill c3, 10, which had extra territorial jurisdiction where we could bring Canadian citizens or permanent residents of Canada back to Canada to try them if, if they went abroad and trafficked or sexually exploited young children. And we did. We had several cases where that happened, and so I learned a lot through the whole process. I learned that education is our greatest weapon to combat human trafficking. There aren't enough police officers, there aren't enough social workers, there aren't enough teachers, but you have to rally everybody, including schools and including students. So we, we now the foundation is all across Canada, and now my daughter, Janet Campbell, left a very high profile job, and she took over the foundation. I volunteer, she tells me I'm their best volunteer. I think that's because I'm consistent. I'm there every day. But you know, I was so grateful that my family, they all had good jobs, and my granddaughter, Kate, she was going to go into the police force, and she got her degree, and one day she came and she said, I want to do something even more useful. And would you let me come and work with the survivors on the foundation? And we put her on probation to see if she could do it. Everyone gets treated the same. Yep, and she turned out amazingly well. And then we started hiring some of the survivors of human trafficking, and we now have staff all across Canada that is doing such wonderful work. And I'm happy to say that on your podcast, Stuart, where we haven't really announced this publicly, but we are building a center to combat human trafficking. It's an education center, and it's going to be on an acre each, 35 acres actually, and it's going to have residences, and in the center is going to have the Learning Center with classrooms and with a library and with an industrial kitchen, where survivors of human trafficking can learn how to cook nutritious meals, and we're going to have rooms so they can grow a garden and learn how to survive, because a lot of These survivors have done nothing but service. Men and women sexually and the traffickers have earned over $180,000 per victim per year. That's why they do it tax free and and so we want to be an example to the rest of Canada, where we know survivors can recover. We have trauma program that takes two years for the survivors to go through, and at Christmas time, like right now, we're, we're doing this podcast in December, but for years, uh, we've, uh. Made Christmas for hundreds of survivors of human trafficking, because a lot of them now have children. They can't go to food banks because the traffickers look for them there. So what we do is all the people that we worked with, and we worked with just under 8000 cases now all across Canada. But what we do is, in all the provinces we have, we have Christmas for everybody. We we take them the Christmas meal. So the whole Christmas week they have food. We find out how old the children are, and with they have a wrapped age appropriate gift that they get at Christmas time. And we have vans like the Winnipeg one is taking place in a couple of weeks, and we have vans that gather at a place, and then we give them, because it's secret. We have to give the vet the drivers, and we have to make sure that the drivers only get the address, and guarantee us that they because they have a driver and they have an assistant, and so address is ripped up, but they deliver all these wonderful, wonderful Christmas baskets. We call them Christmas baskets, but some families get up to five boxes, but everything is wrapped. They have everything. So that's our Christmas program that takes place, and we've done that for over 10 years. So

Stuart Murray  16:34  
joy coming back to what is a very exciting new initiative for the joy Smith Foundation. You're going to be building a resource center and Education Center. It was it around Winnipeg.

Joy Smith  16:46  
It's going to be outside Winnipeg, because you don't want it where you know a high population. What you want. We want it into it into a very quiet country setting where the survivors could recover and where they could go through their programs. And we also train police officers, we train judges, we train lawyers, we train service providers. So, you know, we're just run right off our feet right now, and what we do is they'll come to us and we'll have a place where they can stay, because we're building three story apartment buildings, and we're also building some smaller homes for moms who have kids, so they can have their kids with them, because the survivors, once they get pregnant, they give their children away because they have no means of feeding them and and so what we do is we help them get an education, and we help them integrate into the regular community where people just see them as a regular community family member, and so they can take care of their own children, because otherwise, all the rest of this stuff goes around in a circle. There's many places where people can get a meal. What happens after that? There's many places where they can have a bed for a short length of time. What happens after that? There's some counseling services, but most of it in the NGOs are volunteer, and they're not trained counselors. We have trained counselors. That's what we raise our money for. So we've raised the money for the facility. We've raised the money for the land that we've got the land donated, actually, wow. Good for you. So this is a journey. My daughter pointed out that I've been in it over 30 years. Amazing. I did this when I was in the provincial legislature.

Stuart Murray  18:50  
Enjoy the journey that you described and the understanding that you had, and to try to use your knowledge or education to convince others about what is happening with them, looking at you with some skepticism. Well, a lot of skepticism, but joy. I think that's the part that, you know, I'd like to get your your thoughts a little bit on, because I think a lot of times when people think about human trafficking, it's in another country, it's, it's, it's a ways away it, you know, just it doesn't happen here. And yet again, I'm going to take a line right from the joy Smith Foundation website that basically says, with within one kilometer of you, someone is being lured to sex trafficking. So it is so local. And I mean, that is a shocking, shocking statement, a true, shocking statement. How do you introduce that to people you know without sort of making them alarmed at it, but saying we have to understand this, and then we have to understand through education how we can be supporters, how we can understand it, how we can do things that the joy Smith Foundation is doing.

Joy Smith  19:58  
I'm an educator that's. What I was trained to do. I have my master's degree in math and science, which has nothing to do with making laws, but you apply those concepts and and write those laws. But the fact of the matter is, when you get in front of people, you just tell them less than a kilometer from where you're sitting right now, someone is being lured, and it's because of the internet. It's because of the phones that the kids have, that even though parents put filters on their computers and all the rest of it, it's out there. And you know, I know even my former chief of staff, his wife was showing their little kids trying to find a Cinderella video to a cartoon for them to watch. And they got more than they bargained for as they sat, because it's all over the place. And so with the pandemic that's come and everything like it even got worse, because traffickers know how to to use organized crime knows how to use the internet. They know better than the average bear, you know, use it and and the internet, and all this stuff is is there, and kids know about it like they never knew before, and so they have to be educated to protect themselves, what to look for. And so we go in and into schools all over the place. We go into community centers, we go into churches, we give out free materials. And we've raised our own money. We've raised money to build a facility. We had the land donated by a very generous donor, and so we just keep going, because it affects so many people, and I know that many well to do families. This is where we have the most problem, because the trafficker is really center in middle class to well to do families and everybody thinks, oh, it's the down and out on the street. No, they don't want drug infested. And that's where they land up. Drug infested on the streets. Or they die, you know, one or the other, they disappear. But what they do is they lure, you know, these lovely, beautiful young girls and boys. And we also deal with forced labor like it's not talked about. But my bills also covered forced labor, and we have a lot of forced labor cases now too, and more and more boys in the sex traffic, trafficking, especially sex torsion, and what the boys do, they don't want their parents or anybody to find out. They don't tell anybody, and they commit suicide. So, you know, it's this, we it's all out there. Yeah, sorry

Stuart Murray  22:55  
to interrupt. Can I ask you a question? Just to clarify, because you're, you're an expert on this, what is the difference in you, in your bill, between human trafficking and forced labor. Can

Joy Smith  23:05  
I also talk about one other aspect, totally sex trafficking. You know, it's done over the internet. It's usually the boyfriend that kind of they call it the Romeo scenario, where someone gets to know the individual over the email, over the internet, and they go in the chat rooms, they go on games, they do everything. Every form of social media has it, and we have a very rigorous social media as a matter of fact, that's monitored all the time. But I have to say that they in, we have artificial intelligence now, and so I'll give you an example, Stuart. There was this 13 year old girl. She lived in South, Southern Winnipeg, and she came from, I would say, upper middle class family. And she got on the internet, and she found this cute, what she thought was a 16 year old boy, because he sent his picture, and he was handsome, really cute. And he told her all the things he was interested in, all the things she was interested in, and one day, she said, meet me at the park. And this is during the pandemic. I'm just giving you a typical example, but during the pandemic, and it's a real story, she went to St Patel Park, and she met three men, two of them were in their 20s. One was in their 30s. She thought she was meeting this cute, 16 year old boy. They took her to a motel, and she serviced men sexually the whole day, then they took her back home and they threatened her. They drove past her house and they would get on the. Her emails and say, look out the window, see the car, and they threatened her siblings. She called our office. That ended the people were arrested. So

Stuart Murray  25:12  
again, she had the ability to know that she could find a resource and support and help by calling the joy Smith Foundation.

Joy Smith  25:20  
Well, she accidentally heard about it, because we went and we did a presentation in several of the st Patel schools, and she was in one of the classrooms. That's how she found out about it. So wherever we go, whatever we school, school we go to, there's someone who discloses. We never come away from any school without someone disclosing or several disclosing. So we hand in hand with the resource teachers and the teachers the principals, to help these people get away from them. We try to bring the perpetrators to justice. We had a case just a little while ago. It was all across Canada, including Winnipeg, but it was pretty well from coast to coast, but the operating police officers were from Ontario, so they would lead and they called our office because they said, Look, we have a problem. This particular witness that was going to, you know, say everything the police put her back in her country of origin. 93% of the survivors are born and bread or more are born and bred in Canada, but some of them come from other countries, so they took her back, and then immigration wouldn't let her back in because they knew she was connected to a human trafficking gang. But she was a victim. She wasn't part of the gang anyway. So Janet, my daughter, got on a plane, went to Ottawa, and we have a lot of connections in Ottawa, to make long story short, she got a temporary working visa for her, and they phoned the lawyer of the bad guys and told them that afternoon, they pled guilty. And this particular police force got over $4 million out of proceeds of crime. So we are very close to we deal with police we but we never betray the survivors. If they don't want to tell we leave it up to them. But we we do a lot of stuff, a lot of things,

Stuart Murray  27:41  
yeah, and so joy, just coming back to the difference between human trafficking and forced labor, can you just give a definition from your perspective and why that was important to be in your bill?

Joy Smith  27:50  
Well, forced labor is when people like to come to Canada and they like to earn money here. Sometimes they go back to their countries of origin, but they get special paperwork and they come. But what happens is a lot of them like to stay, and there's complications that that happen when particularly in agriculture or in nannies, people like that, where they get forced into sex trafficking, or they get forced into forced labor, where they're kept in squalor, really. They sleep on in the basement of houses. They're not paid. They go to work. They're treated badly, and often they don't know where to go. So we're working with Border Patrol and others to enhance the when they come over, they need, we need to keep track of them. We need to make sure that we know and they're they just get lost, is what do, and they don't go back. And when the traffickers get a hold of them that they could be in forced labor for a very long time. We're working with a case right now of two young men, and they're just forced. They were just forced to work day and night with very little food, no pay, and they were threatened all the time. They were beaten, and eventually, one of them was sexually exploited. He was sexually exploited. He wasn't trafficked. Trafficked is when he sold. It's like modern day slave trade, but sexually exploited as he was raped. But you know, it's an ugly side of the crimes in Canada, and it's been under the Public radar screen for very long time. It's not anymore. It's really out there, and a lot of people are joining in to stop human trafficking. Know, you

Stuart Murray  30:00  
know, as you say, 30 years of your passion, your work, to bring this to where it is today, and the way that you've made it a national organization, that you've created coast to coast to coast. You know, one of the challenges, joy that strikes me is that you've got a local issue of human trafficking, and let's just use Winnipeg a local issue here in Winnipeg, yet the ability to have it as an international organization that works outside of Canada, the United States, it could be somewhere in Europe. It could be in many places. It strikes me that one of the challenges that even though the Criminal Code is very, very prescriptive, what they can do to human traffickers, the ability to take them to court, or to be able to get the burden of proof on some of these perpetrators. It strikes me that it might be, it must be quite a challenge, simply because of it may be happening local, but it may be being driven from something outside of Canada.

Joy Smith  30:57  
Well, it's mostly driven inside of Canada. In Canada, the greatest amount of human trafficking is between Canada United States because of our border, our we have a big border that's unprotected. And also, you know, guy can take a gal across to go shopping, you know, and no one would know that she's being held captive. It's just that his girlfriend, he and his girlfriend, are going shopping, you know? But we have been recognized, not only worldwide, because we've worked in the UK. We helped Ireland get its trafficking laws. We've worked in Taiwan, and we worked in Ukraine, when Putin attacked Ukraine, there was a lot of human trafficking. Initially, we sent a team over there and one of our lead police officers trained, you know, traffic cop, or just cops, how to recognize human trafficking, but here in Canada, we were Janet was asked to go to the US to give advice and to go at the invitation of the American ambassador and the Canadian consulate to go. She was there for a month, visiting all that she could the human trafficking service providers, and she was on panels. And because we are recognized, we were the only NGO that was invited from Canada. And we are recognized because of the work we've done here in the in Canada, in the United States, we had an American girl who was captured and brought to Canada quite recently, and she landed up, she fled to Winkler, Manitoba and the trafficker founder, and so we had to do A recovery there. And one of the win clear police officers was just incredible. He did so much. He's the one that brought it to our attention. So she was an American girl, so she's now, you know, she's now recovering in the US, and she's doing quite well. It's all over the place. Stuart, it really is, yeah, and

Stuart Murray  33:22  
joy, with all of the great work that you have done and you're doing, you know, you've got some great partners again, all of that great information on the joy Smith website, I'd encourage anybody who's listening to go to that website. There's great information to be gathered from that joy I wondered, have you had a chance to integrate or partner or have conversations with those who are looking after the missing, murdered indigenous women and girls that whole movement. Have you had a chance to share, you know, resources, stories or support with that organization?

Joy Smith  33:55  
We've been full partners with the Matty organization and with Mama way Diane reskay has just left. She used to be the CEO, but we're in full partnership with those two organizations. We have a lot of indigenous survivors that we work with every single day. And you know, we've helped we've helped them a lot. Sometimes, in some provinces, the indigenous community is over representative in the human trafficking initiative, but it happens to everybody. There's more and more newcomers who we had, one girl from the Ukraine who fled to Canada and she wants to go back to Ukraine, because the traffickers caught her just as she entered Canada, and she lived in pure hell here, and so we helped her get her back to Ukraine, and she rather faced the bombs than she would face the traffickers. But our police forces are excellent. They really are. Are they work so hard Stuart, and they're just under resourced, underfunded, and we work with them very closely. A lot of service providers are doing a great job. It just depends which one it is, Air Canada. Shout out to Air Canada. They've been our partner for ages, and they take our victims from province to province with escorts and their dog and their luggage. We had one. She had 40 pieces of luggage. They usually don't have anything, and she had a dog. And they got everything from what, from BC to another province where she needed to be. So we have incredible partners, incredible people that are working with us. And we have, this year, we have on February the 20th, one of the most stand outstanding. I guess it is a fundraiser, but it's the most outstanding heroes, heroes from the military who worked on human trafficking and and survivors and and people that you would never know that have done such incredible work. And we do that every year at some, some point. And the week of February 20 is the recognition Canada's recognition of human trafficking in Canada. So we always pick that week to do special things every year. Yeah,

Stuart Murray  36:35  
good for you. Yeah. It's always about the education, as you say, right? The awareness, creating it, having the conversations joy. What are some of the key signs if somebody's listening and saying, Okay, number one is, I didn't realize that there potentially could be some human trafficking going within a kilometer of where I am. So number one, learn something. Now the question is, how would I know? What are some red flags? What Some things should I be looking for to understand that this could be happening. And I never once was aware of any of these signs. The first

Joy Smith  37:06  
thing is to see the change in behavior and dress like the daughter or the son will dress differently, like if, if there's a daughter that's wearing clothes that she can't afford. You know, she doesn't have the money you didn't buy the parents didn't buy them. But she's and she's more dressed more provocatively, because initially, when they fall in love, they dress like the boyfriend asked them to dress, and they get so many compliments that they think it's appropriate, and to watch for things like jewelry, like gold chains, and if you see them, drop their regular friends, their regular sports teams, and they have a whole new set of friends. Make sure you meet those friends. You'll meet one or two, but you won't really know all those friends and two cell phones. I always tell teachers, if a student has two cell phones and the parent hasn't given them that extra cell phone, they're being trafficked for sure. Wow, yeah. And then if they come home with cuts and bruises that seem weird, you know, that's just out of the ordinary. And they say, Well, I fell or I got hurt in basketball. No, all these signs point to human trafficking, and the kid can live at home being trafficked as well.

Stuart Murray  38:36  
So joy if somebody were to recognize that, whether it's a parent, an aunt and uncle, a neighbor, what would you advise them to do? What would their next steps be? Now that they've they're suspicious, they're not sure they see something, they feel pretty confident. What would their next steps be?

Joy Smith  38:51  
Well, you see, there's a complication here, because it's called fear, because when they get to a point that they're being trafficked. Often. Their lives are being threatened. Their siblings lives. So they're kind of afraid to they should report it to the police. Now what people have to understand is the police do take your name, they take your address, they take their phone number, but they never reveal who reported. And out there, people think, oh, they'll find out who did this report. No, they won't. The police can't do that, but they have to have those particulars to know that it's a legitimate problem. So report to the police. If you're afraid to report to the police, call us, because we'll get you to the right people. Don't let it go. And you know, sometimes we've had people. We had a woman the other day who said, Well, this ridiculous, but I had a bad feeling, and she gave a full report. And. She got the license plate of the car and everything, she just didn't like it, and to tell you the truth, it turned out to be a trafficking case. Oh, so she just called us, because I want to call the police, but we told her we will be passing this on to the police, and she had a decision to make, right? So we never betray people's trust, but we try to persuade them that it's okay, it's safe, and you can life. I

Stuart Murray  40:30  
think you use the term and please correct me if I'm wrong, but that sort of an average perpetrator, tax free, makes about $180,000

Joy Smith  40:39  
is that more than that? That that was six years ago. Oh,

Stuart Murray  40:41  
my goodness. Okay, so it's a couple 100 grand that these people are making tax free. As you say, you know, I know that you spend a tremendous amount of time, you know, with the victims. Which is, which is so, so critical, in your opinion? And I think I know the answer to this, but I'm trying to find a way to say that, you know, you've got the perpetrators, you've got the victims, but do you have to have, and I don't know again, please. I always want to make sure I'm using the correct terminology. But the users, the people that use are they called Johns. The Johns are the users. The Johns are the users. Okay, what about the level of education to Johns to sort of explain and educate them that what they're doing is so harmful.

Joy Smith  41:23  
Well, you know, surprisingly, I was surprised years ago. I'm not anymore, but the johns are usually professional people. They're people of money, like, if you want to buy the services of a traffic victim, it costs money. You have to pay the trafficker. The girls don't get the money. The traffic is the money, and they are well healed. Usually they can afford it. We had a truck driver who had a good job. He when He came home, he always told his wife he never really had that much money, but he blew $40,000 on serving ser servicing himself with young girls, and they were all trafficked. And you know, they just didn't and they dress them up so they look older than they are. And you know, it's just a horrible existence. So there's human smuggling. Is another one. I wanted to talk about. Human smuggling is different. We talked about forced labor, and that's when people want to come to Canada. You know, they don't usually walk over the border. They're just they want to come, and then they disappear into the system. They're not checked on. But human smuggling is something different. That's when someone pays someone on a boat to come over and come illegally to Canada, and so the traffickers have them right there then, because once they hit the shores, they can't reveal that they're illegally in Canada. They'll be sent back so often they're they're either forced labor or sex trafficked, and they live their whole lives in bondage. And we know of a lot of occasions where that has happened. So we have human smuggling, human trafficking and forced labor, and we deal with them all, actually,

Stuart Murray  43:20  
yeah. So joy, your profession, your passion as a teacher, you're bringing it forward in all of these conversations that you're having, and you've done a tremendous amount. And in a utopic world, the goal would be to end human trafficking period. I don't want to be unrealistic to say I'm not sure that's there, but if we don't have that as a goal, then why do we get up in the morning? Right? So joy. Does a conversation have to start with more of the politicians understanding this, or is it more educators that understand it in the schools? Just you know, there's so much great information that you have, but you know the education, the understanding, the ability to appreciate that this is happening in our backyard, and why we should all be so passionate to ensure that we're understanding this and engaged in this conversation. How can we make sure that it does continue, let's say positively, that it does continue to do what the joy Smith Foundation continues to advocate for.

Joy Smith  44:18  
You know, we've seen such a change in lives. That's why we say education is our greatest weapon, because nobody has to go rescue anybody. They're not in danger. All they have to do is get information. And we always present in schools in such a way that, you know, they're not afraid, but they're helped. And as I said, every school, you know, they disclose but the way we can stop it, and I think the only way we can stop it, is to join together as a country and politicians. They're not the most important people, the only the ones that are interested in are important. The. Rest of them. You know, they always want to grow up with, to be somebody, or to have a little position or something which fades away 10 minutes from Parliament Hill. But you know, if you want to have lasting effect, protect your own families, because you think as a politician, this couldn't happen to your children or grandchildren. Think again. I one MP who wasn't very interested. I used to see him. He'd be very, you know, disinterested. He'd raise his hand when a House leader told him, you know, we're going to vote for this. But he was very disinterested. He had six kids, so anyway, having said that, one day in July, he called me at my home, desperate. His child had been lured and was being trafficked. I spent all of July and August making sure that kid was safe. She was only 14 years old, and we went back to Parliament in the end of September, October, and the little girl came in and she said, Oh, thank you, Mrs. Smith, I feel so stupid. I said, No, no, no, no, don't feel that way. You're a real hero, because you survived it. And she said, I want to be one of your speakers. Well, the parents came in after her and said, this isn't going to happen. So I said, why? And they said, well, our status in the community were in so I said, What am I chopped liver? I don't know what his ambitions were, but that little girl, you know, I lost a lot of respect for him. But a lot of other people have taken up the cause, and some of them do it because I don't get any money. I volunteer my time all the time. But you know, some of them need a job, so they start, but they don't know what they're doing, and they do more harm than good, but there's a lot of them to do a lot of good, and so we partner with those people, and it takes a nation to stop it. So basically, getting parents, students, teachers, lawmakers, law enforcers, all the all them, all them involved and finding out about human trafficking, that is why we give our information away for free steward. We earn our own money to do that, and we raise our own money because it would take for everybody's problem solved. And so it's been a full time job raising money and putting the programs in our our program for the survivors takes two years for them to complete, and then we help them learn how to feed themselves and to feed their children nutritionally, and we help them get an education, and we help them integrate into the regular community where people don't know their background. They're just family. They're just

Stuart Murray  47:51  
yeah, they're they're people that are as they are, human beings and deserving to be in this world

Joy Smith  47:56  
that's real, solving the problem, you know, giving them a meal for a day, a bed for a week, whatever, doesn't solve the problem. They need to. They have complex trauma, so they need to be held through that complex trauma. It's terrible,

Stuart Murray  48:12  
you know, Joy. One of the things that you have is you have a podcast called Luma and bloom. Tell us a little bit about Luma and bloom. I listened to it, I thought they go places where some people may not feel comfortable going, but it's an important podcast. Tell us a little bit about the Luma and bloom podcast.

Joy Smith  48:29  
We added Luma and bloom because it covers a multitude of topics that can make citizens and youth and everybody else vulnerable to being trafficked. So we cover everyday things, and there's a lot of heroes on Luma and bloom. Kate is my granddaughter. She that's her brain child. Nicole is a survivor, human traffic survivor. She works for us. We hired her. And, you know, the lumen bloom podcast, I think, is very good, and we have a lot of followers, and we have a lot of reaction to everything we do. And so it gets a word out there, because people need to talk about things that influence their lives over and above the human trafficking. So how can they be empowered? How can they become good business women or men? How can they do their grooming properly? How can they we had Hillary druxman on and she talked about how to start a business. Yeah, perfect. Yeah. And we had skip on. Skip is our security. He was, you know, you've seen SEAL team, where you jump out of the plane and swim to the shore and you take down the bad guy in Afghanistan. That's skip, and now he's the head of our security. But you know, all these things go together. We're all connected. In every way, shape and form. And thank you for asking about the podcast, because that's an integral part of empowering people. Yeah,

Stuart Murray  50:08  
and the other piece, too, Joy. I keep promoting the joy Smith Foundation website because it's a great website. But you know, if anybody's listening to this, typically, what I always ask one of my guests is, if people want to learn more. You know, if they want to get more engaged, is there any way they can find some, some books, and again, I went on your website. There is a book, obviously, for children, called the beaver and the muskrat, but there's some serious books. I mean, the the human trafficking Canada's secret

Joy Smith  50:35  
human trafficking Canada's secret shame. She could shame, right?

Stuart Murray  50:39  
Which is available on your website. You can, you can order it if people want to get

Joy Smith  50:43  
it. That is a book that has gone best seller times over. The author, Paul Boga, came and said, I want to write your story. And I said, it's not my story. It is the survivor story. And he says, Well, I don't know any Well, I introduced him to a whole bunch of them on his own dime. He went from coast to coast and interviewed them. We had some rules. He had to meet them in a public place and and, you know, all the rest of all this rules to keep him safe too. But having said that, the story, he wrote it as a fiction, but it is a true story

Stuart Murray  51:21  
before we say goodbye. One of the things I always like to ask my guest is, is there a question that I didn't ask you that you wish that I would have asked you about this incredible work that that you through the joy Smith Foundation

Joy Smith  51:34  
are doing now? The question is, is it possible to solve this problem? My answer is absolutely, if everybody found out about human trafficking and protected their families, we wouldn't have this issue. And it's so big in Canada right now is second only to the drug trade and the arms so we don't want it to be growing. And if we all work at it and all do our part, everything that we do is very important,

Stuart Murray  52:04  
yeah, Joy, thank you for the great work that you do. Thank you for spending some time on the human zone rights podcast. Again, anybody listening, you know, please go to the Luma and bloom podcast to learn more about this. I think we need to promote each other and keep the word out there. So so. Joy Smith, on a personal level, thank you on a professional level, thank you for what you do. You're so welcome.

Matt Cundill  52:22  
Thanks for listening to humans on rights. A transcript of this episode is available by clicking the link in the show notes of this episode. Humans on rights is recorded and hosted by Stuart Murray, social media marketing by Buffy Davie, music by Doug Edmond. For more, go to Human Rights hub.ca produced and distributed by the sound off media company you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai