Daycare coordinator Kathy Arsenault urges parents to educate their children about the danger of needles. Credit: Elise Schulzke.

Ottawa’s drug problem is “disconcerting” to a daycare provider who has found used syringes in her school’s yards.

At least 35 publically run daycares are located within 150 metres of where syringes have been found in the past few years, a number one care provider calls “startling”.

Many daycares in Ottawa are situated close to where used syringes have been found. Map created with data from the City of Ottawa Open Data Portal and Access to Information Requests. Credit: Elise Schulzke.

“I find it really disturbing,” said Kathy Arsenault, coordinator of the Vanier Cooperative School Age Program. She added that she has found about 6 needles on daycare property in the two decades she’s worked there.

Since 2011, the City of Ottawa and the syringe retrieval program “needle hunters” have collected about 60,000 improperly discarded sharps from public places. Of those, 80 per cent were found the in Rideau-Vanier area.

Used sharps often carry HIV and Hepatitis C, which are transmitted via the blood of an infected person. About 80 per cent of Ottawa’s regular drug users are suffering from one the two illnesses and the contaminate can live on a needle for two months after injection.

It is illegal to dispose of syringes and crack pipes in standard garbage, so the city provides over 70 needle drop boxes at various locations around the city. The black, mailbox-looking stands have been key in cleaning up the streets, said Craig Calder, an Ottawa Public Health safety leader.

“We try to publicize the use of the boxes,” he said. He continued that the city added 12 new boxes at the end of last year, which is encouraging proper disposal of used needles.

Despite the new boxes, the city reported that almost half of Ottawa’s 5,600 regular drug users inject in public spaces. It’s this statistic that has Arsenault concerned.

Created with data taken from the Problematic Substance Use 2016 report from the City of Ottawa. Credit: Elise Schulzke.

“We have to do sweeps and checks to ensure it’s safe to play,” she said, explaining the lengthy clean up the teachers conduct before letting the children outside. She said she realizes the daycare’s neighbourhood has a reputation for “salacious activity”.

Her daycare was advised by Ottawa Public Health to invest in proper needle disposal equipment -like leather gloves and metal tongs- which they did about a decade ago.

A study conducted in Montreal found that more than 270 children had been accidentally stabbed with used syringes between 1995 and 2006, though none contracted an infection. Ottawa has seen at least a dozen such incidents in the last several years.

But the risks aren’t panicking everyone. Alexandra Soto said she isn’t “too worried” about her three-year-old son, who goes to daycare in Orleans.

“It would make me concerned if they found syringes,” she said. “But it could also happen on anyone’s front lawn.”

Calder agrees that it is unlikely a child would find a needle. “We’ve never had any complaints from parents or daycares about syringes,” he said.

Arsenault’s hands-on experience tells her otherwise.

Ten years ago she took her daycare on a walk to the grocery store three blocks away. On their way home, a child saw a needle near the sidewalk and reached down to grab it. Arsenault said that close call is part of the reason she feels it’s important to educate children.

“You can’t get people to stop doing drugs, but you can teach your children,” she said firmly. Because of their precocious nature, parents and teachers should “tell them what it is and why not to touch it.”

There are no municipal or provincial licensing regulations regarding proximity of daycares to locations with known drug activity. “Each daycare provider is responsible for determining their location,” said Courtney Ferguson, a media relations spokesperson for the city. “The Ministry of Education is then responsible for licensing that location.”

The Ottawa Police were unable to comment if drug use in the city was increasing, though charges related to cocaine, heroin and crystal meth have all gone up in the last year.

“All we can do is educate our children” Arsenault repeated.

Business tourists and subjective police reporting are to blame for Ottawa’s soaring human trafficking rates, experts say.

Ottawa has one of the worst reputations for human trafficking in Ontario and Quebec, with a whopping 59 incidents in 2015 alone. Those incidents led the Ottawa Police to lay more than 300 charges last year.  The cities that you might expect to be facing the biggest numbers are dwarfed by the capital region. Ottawa deals with about nine times more trafficking than Montreal or Toronto, according to Statistics Canada.

The increasingly high rate could be explained by diligent policing –Ottawa has Canada’s highest reporting rate– but Sgt. Jeff Leblanc of the Ottawa Police said that’s not the case. “We’ve been doing more proactive work,” he said. “But that still doesn’t explain the jump in numbers.”

Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal comprise a large part of what traffickers call “the pipeline” –a set of highways and cities that are used to move girls from place to place. Ottawa is a main hub because of its prominence in the corridor between Montreal and Toronto.

But Leblanc said it’s not the only thing boosting the rates. Though crime reporting is universal across Canadian policing, he said human trafficking violations can be filed under four different categories. The category label chosen is left to the discretion of the officer filing the case, meaning the any incident could be reported four different ways depending on which police officer you ask. Leblanc said the factors contributing to Ottawa’s towering rates are inconsistent reporting, mingled with high supply and demand.

A single girl can bring in between $500 and $1700 in one night, putting Ottawa’s market at more than $26 million per year, as reported by PACT-Ottawa. The victims are marketed mainly on the site backpage.com, with over 200 new ads posted each day. The RCMP estimates that about half of the women in these ads are trafficked.

Rescuing them is tricky, said Simone Bell, who was trafficked herself. She explained that traffickers psychologically condition their victims to believe they are freely choosing to be there.

“When I left my trafficking situation, I had no idea what human trafficking was or that that’s what happened to me.” Bell was living in Ottawa when she was lured into trafficking by a friend at the age of 21. For four years she was shuttled through the Ontario/Quebec pipeline, being sold to strangers.

When asked why she thought rates in Ottawa were so high, Bell answered in one word: government. “When you’re working in the sex trade, a huge percent of your clients are here for business,” she continued. “Men come for a few days and then leave.”

Ottawa welcomes just over 10 million visitors each year, with about 750,000 coming on business, according to the City of Ottawa tourism report. An international criminology study profiled the average ‘john’ –a client of sex workers– and found that the demographics were the picture of an average businessman. A typical client was married, earned over $80,000 and had a university education.

In 2014, the Canadian government changed the laws surrounding the prosecution of sex workers to focus on punishing the buyers and not the girls themselves. “We have laws, but how those laws get implemented needs to be looked at,” said Kayla Charlery of the Ottawa Coalition to End Human Trafficking. “When someone is associated with trafficking, the current sentences aren’t accurate to the crime.”

The provincial and federal governments are also involved in the fight against trafficking. Over the summer, Ontario pledged $27 million to end human trafficking and the federal justice department is funding a five-year project called Hope Found to help rehabilitate victims in Ottawa.