Tuesday, September 7, 2010 11:39 AM
Jane Taber
But the Conservative MP’s family, especially her RCMP officer son, Eric, encouraged her to keep up the fight. His work in that area was Ms. Smith’s inspiration for her private members’ bill.
Even before she was elected to her Winnipeg-area riding in 2004, she had volunteered, working with trafficking victims. She had been disturbed and moved by their stories.
“It had become a family affair to try to get it through,” she recalled in a recent interview.
In July her bill, giving mandatory minimum prison sentences of five to six years for human traffickers, became law.
And to build on that, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews announced Tuesday morning a partnership with Crime Stoppers as part of a campaign – the Blue Blindfold campaign – aimed at reporting and raising awareness about human trafficking.
He paid tribute to Ms. Smith for her work at a news conference. “This crime is disturbing and uncomfortable and it needs to be stopped,” Mr. Toews said, noting that Canada is not immune to human traffickers.
He said that most of the trafficking victims, who are usually forced into the sex trade, come from Asia, including South Korea, China, Taiwan and Malaysia. As well, there are victims from Eastern Europe, including Ukraine. But he noted there is very little data on the extent of human trafficking in Canada.
Part of the campaign includes a video depicting people wearing blue blindfolds as they go about their everyday activities. This is to emphasize that Canadians should not turn a blind eye to the issue.
Officials are hoping Canadians will twig to the problem and report crimes, especially given they can now do so through the anonymity of Crime Stoppers
For Ms. Smith, however, all of this has been bittersweet. She has achieved what few backbench MPs ever achieve – she made law and made a difference to the trafficking victims, some of whom she knows and keeps in contact with. But it came amid her husband, Bart’s, continuing battle against an aggressive form of lymphoma.
A rehash of the 1910 Mann Act, a cheap politically correct trick to gain
votes.
The Mann Act was "loosely worded", it sounded grand, "The White Slave Traffic
Act" a sensational act of protection towards abused women being "traffic across
state borders" etc.
The Act was a political decision, just like the conservatives, it was used by
authorities anytime they got desperate to prosecute the politically incorrect.
The Act was nothing less than a Conservative law, that was designed in itself to
be an abuse of the justice system, basically if a woman crossed a state line and
was somehow involved in the remotest of a sex scandal, or if a man had an affair
with a woman and crossed state lines, these ended up in prosecution.
Mr. Harper is full of cheap legal tricks that appeal to the brain dead voting
majority who follow like religious disciples the Republican gospel regurgitated
in the Great White North by Mr. Stephen Harper, the Americans Man in the
unofficial state of the USA called Canada.
The conservatives, if they had a brain would find far more deserving legal
issues that require legal reasoning and logical thinking, something that is
quite missing from the Republican Church in Canada.
Canada has a Judiciary, riddled with corrupt underbelly that turns men into
slaves and removes from children, their right to have a father, it supports the
Legal Cartel and extreme feminists who have made Canadian men, virtual slaves,
without legal rights.
www.OttawamensCentre.com