Ottawa became Canada’s leading city in police-reported human trafficking incidents in 2015, making up over a quarter of the Canadian total according to data released by Statistics Canada this summer.

59 incidents of human trafficking were reported by Ottawa police last year, a significant increase from the 23 incidents in 2014 and 12 in 2013. Of the 210 incidents across Canada, Ottawa made up for 28 per cent.

The reason for those numbers? The Ottawa Police Human Trafficking Unit, at least in part.

In 2014, the Ottawa Police began investigating human trafficking in Ottawa by creating a unit designed specifically to fight it. The team, which consists of four detectives and one sergeant, investigates cases where trafficking might be a concern and try to help the victims by bringing them to a place of safety.

“We have seen a steady increase in the numbers since the start of the task force,” said Sgt. Jeff Leblanc, who is the sergeant assigned to the unit.

Leblanc did warn not to trust the numbers blindly. Numbers might vary based on who is filing the case, since human trafficking violations can be filed in different categories.

Human trafficking is defined by the criminal code as recruiting, transporting, transferring, receiving, holding, concealing or harbouring a person, or exercising control or influence over the movements of a person, for the purposes of exploiting them. In Ottawa, the market is making potentially as much as $25.5 million a year, according to a report by PACT-Ottawa released in 2014, with each girl making anywhere from $500-$1700 a night.

Although this paints a general picture of the human trafficking market in Ottawa, Leblanc said that its hard to get a sense of the scope of the issue, adding that his team only has five people. “Any time of the day you can look and find over 100 ads…it’s hard to know who is in the sex trade willingly from that and who is having someone force them,” Leblanc said.

The issue of human trafficking has been gaining more attention from the public and the government recently, according to Leblanc. In 2012 the federal government launched Canada’s National Action Plan to Combat Human Trafficking, and gives annual reports on progress. And this past June it was announced that Ontario will invest up to $72 million as part of the Strategy to End Human Trafficking, which will focus on increasing awareness and understanding of the causes of the crime.

Looking back at the data released by Statistics Canada, it is noteworthy that while 2015 saw 59 incidents of police reported human trafficking, only 8 persons were charged. 32 were cleared. Toronto, which saw only 40 incidents of police-reported trafficking, ended the year with 45 persons charged.

Note that the reason for Toronto’s higher persons charged than incidents, according to Statistics Canada, is that an “incident” refers to a single event, but there can be more than one victim, accuser or criminal offence provided they occur at the same time in the same place. “So while we may have a single incident there can also be more then one accused which can result in the number of charged being high than the number of incidents,” said Gowoon Lee, Media Relations Officer at Statistics Canada, in an email.

For those persons charged with human trafficking, the standard prison sentence under Bill C-49 is up to 14 years. If the accused kidnapped the victim, committed an aggravated assault or sexual assault against the victim, or caused the victim’s death during the trafficking violation, the sentence is imprisonment for life.

Statistics Canada released this month that the national unemployment rate increased to seven per cent in August, however increased unemployment rates in August are nothing new for Ontario women.

Unemployment rates for Ontario women between ages 15 to 64 increased in August to 8.2 per cent. This is 1.1 points higher than July’s unemployment rate of 7.1 per cent for the same group, according to Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey for August 2016.

Previous years’ seasonally unadjusted data from the Labour Force Survey for Ontario women shows a similar trend in unemployment rates. Since 2006 women’s unemployment rates in Ontario have risen or stayed the same from July to August and then decreased in September, with the exception of 2014 where the rate moved from 9 to 8.9 per cent from July to August but then dropped down to 6.9 in September.

August tends to have the highest unemployment rates of the summer for Ontario women, averaging at 8.75 per cent and then dropping to an average of 7.04 per cent in September over the past decade.

“Everything is kind of sleepy in August and things seem to wake up a little bit more in September,” says Cynthia Meshorer, an employment counsellor at Times Change Women’s Employment Service, a non-profit organization providing services to women to aid their job search.

Meshorer says the use of their services tends to see an increase in September. In August, 66 women signed up for their orientation session but they anticipate 99 participants in September, a “significant increase,” according to Meshorer.

“I think overall, industry—everything sort of ramps up in the fall. The summer is vacation, it’s schools out. Everything tends to dip a bit.”

With school returning in September, the organization also sees mothers returning to work.

“We do tend to see a little group of women whose children who have left high school and they are real empty-nesters,” says Meshorer. “They have settled their kids in university and now they are looking to come back to the labour force.”

Women who have not been working for a number of years face many challenges, says Meshorer. She says these challenges include whether or not they have the proper skills, have kept old connections, gaps in their resume and their confidence levels.

“It takes people a while to make the decision [to return to work],” says Meshorer. “So by the end of summer they are ready to go and want to return to the labour force, but by time they hook up with a place or find a job, it takes some time.”

However, mothers joining the job search as is only one possible explanation unemployment is higher for women at the end of summer, according to Gilles Grenier, a University of Ottawa economics professor who specializes in labour economics and unemployment research.

“There are a lot of seasonal variations in unemployment due to climate and people’s habits,” says Grenier. “For example, September is the time when people go back to school, so there is more jobs in education.”

However this same trend is not seen for Ontario men. From the most recent Labour Force Survey data, Statistics Canada reported men’s unemployment in Ontario move from 7.1 per cent in July to 7.3 per cent in August. From 2006 to now, average unemployment rates for Ontario men moves from 8.22 per cent to 7.3 per cent between July and August and then down to 7.24 per cent in September.

Comparatively, Ontario women’s unemployment rates between 2006 and 2016 on average are 0.9 points higher in August than Ontario men’s rates and 0.2 points lower in September.

An analysis of profiles done on offenders entering Canadian correctional institutions suggests that the reintegration potential of aboriginal offenders is significantly lower than the one of non-aboriginals, even when the crimes dragging them to prison are the same.

According to the 2013-2014 Correctional Services Canada’s (CSC) Offender Profile, 44 per cent of aboriginal offenders are considered to have a low potential of reintegration, compared to 28 per cent for non-aboriginals.

The reintegration potential refers to the offender’s ability to return to a successful crime-free life in the society, says Carleton University law professor focusing on First Nations, Jane Dickson. The decision, which is based on a number of factors including the offender’s history, record of violence, education level and employment, is intended to place them in the least restrictive setting possible.

However, “Most of the factors are beyond the control of the offender”, says Dickson.

Ed Bianchi, the programs manager at KAIROS, a gathering of churches advocating for aboriginals’ rights, says this phenomenon of classification and inability for reintegration traces back to a number of years ago.

“This simply emphasizes that for years, aboriginal people have been taught that their culture is inferior and that they themselves are inferior, while non-aboriginals have been taught that their culture is better”, he says.

In fact, it traces back to the residential schools experience, which lies at the root of the over-incarceration and injustice on aboriginals. The population in prison continues to grow to this day.

According to a 2013 report published by the office of the Correctional Investigator of Canada, there has been a 43.5 per cent increase in the federal Aboriginal inmate population, compared to a 9.6 per cent increase in non-Aboriginal inmates since 2005.

“Yet we had 20 years of supposedly government commitment to indigenous incarceration, and it’s just getting worst”, says Dickson.

Aboriginal people entering prison often come from similar backgrounds, which leads them to be profiled as high-risk offenders more often than non-aboriginals. The stigmatization increases their chances of being placed in a maximum-security institution where it is then much harder, if not impossible, to get access to the programs they need.

“They sit in prison and wait, while non-aboriginals are getting the support that they need to be released on parole,” says Dickson.

Howard Sapers, the correctional investigator of Canada, says that there is a clear systemic bias in the decision-making done in the correctional service. “You create a trajectory for aboriginals and it’s really hard for them to get out of it. If you think they’ll do poorly, they will do poorly.”

However, CSC says that it is developing and implementing strategies and programs to improve the reintegration results of Indigenous offenders and address the gap in the overall correctional results between Indigenous and non-Indigenous offenders.

“We provide offenders with access to a range of rehabilitation programs that contribute to reduced rates of reoffending and increased public safety”, says Megan Hooper, communications advisor for CSC. “These programs are available to all federal offenders who require them throughout the duration of their sentences, including offenders classified at maximum-security level.”

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s final report in 2015 acknowledges that the Supreme Court has recognized that the legacy of residential schools should be considered when sentencing aboriginal offenders.

“We try to help aboriginals in jail and in court, but both of those institutions can’t do an awful lot to what happened in the past 25 years of history”, says Dickson.

“Social problems require social solutions.”

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.