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.