Police officers, lawyers and advocates from across Canada gathered in Saskatoon on Monday to discuss human trafficking.
The Maddison Sessions, a national summit hosted by anti-human trafficking group #NotInMyCity, is organized for anti-trafficking groups to share knowledge and resources.
“This is the cream of the crop of human trafficking investigators from coast to coast, across the entire country,” said Paul Brandt, the founder of #NotInMyCity.
Brandt, who previously rose to fame as a country music artist, helped create the organization in 2017. He has run The Maddison Sessions for three years, which he says came about after discussing the need for greater inter-agency collaboration on human trafficking with several RCMP officers.
“For 20 years, we’ve been trying as investigators to get together in one room just to share best practices, but it’s been challenging because the resources haven’t been made available, and there wasn’t anyone to take the lead,” Brandt recounted officers telling him.
Citing security reasons, Brandt didn’t disclose how many organizations are participating in the conference this year, but said that relationships built in past conferences had directly led to arrests.
The Maddison Sessions is named in honour of Maddison Fraser, a victim of human trafficking from Alberta who lost her life in 2015.
According to #NotInMyCity, human trafficking is one of the fastest growing crimes in Canada, with 93 per cent of victims being Canadians trafficked domestically. Half of the victims are Indigenous, and 90 per cent of them are women.
#NotInMyCity also reports that online sexual exploitation, which it says is frequently used as the means to recruit victims, has increased by 616 per cent since 2014.
“Human trafficking happens right in front of us,” said Sgt. David Lane, an RCMP officer from Nova Scotia who was one of the original collaborators of the organization with Brandt. “They call it ‘the hidden epidemic’ for a reason.”
“The best human trafficking victims we get are the ones that we prevent. The ones that don’t get into it, so the earlier we can look at these indicators, the better,” said Lane.
“Organized crime has realized how lucrative and how much money they can make, and to be honest, how much they can traffic people in the open,” he said. “They’re depending on us not working together.”
Insp. Erin Coates from the Saskatoon Police represented a local presence at the conference, praising Brandt and #NotInMyCity for the collaborative opportunities the conference has brought.
“The Maddison Sessions builds our investigator’s capacity to stay ahead of the traffickers and their evolving tactics,” she said.
“Talking to investigators, this is definitely the best and probably their favourite training.”
The Canadian Human Trafficking Hotline, which can be reached at 1-833-900-1010, connects victims and survivors with emergency and social services and law enforcement and accepts tips from the public.
