Canada’s privacy laws are one of the “real barriers” to addressing the significant issue of cross-border sex trafficking, the outgoing U.S. ambassador to Canada says.
Sex trafficking is one of several border security concerns that have been routinely discussed between the two countries under the Biden administration, Ambassador David Cohen says, long before U.S. president-elect Donald Trump began pushing Canada and Mexico to address irregular migration and drug trafficking or risk punishing tariffs.
While Cohen points out progress has been made on those fronts, he said there was still work to do on other border issues.
“Not mentioned in the president-elect’s social media post is a problem we have with sex trafficking between Canada and the United States,” he told Mercedes Stephenson in an interview that aired Sunday on The West Block.
“Sex trafficking between the United States and Canada, and between Mexico and the United States as well, is a significant issue, and it is one of the real focus areas of our Customs and Border Protection personnel (in the U.S.)”
Cohen said the biggest issue was adequate information sharing and cooperation between Canadian and American law enforcement agencies — particularly privacy laws surrounding the National Sex Offender Registry.
Canadian law states information in the registry is only available to police for limited investigative purposes. By contrast, U.S. sex offender data from across the country is openly accessible to the public and is easily shared between police forces.
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“One of the real barriers to full cooperation, maybe the way the United States would like to see it, is the heightened privacy rules and regulations that exist in Canada, as opposed to the United States,” he said.
Asked if the U.S. felt those laws were protecting sex traffickers, Cohen responded, “Correct.”
Cohen said legislation is being considered in Canada after conversations with the U.S. that would give convicted sex offenders “a lesser level of privacy protections.”
Canada and the U.S. also entered into negotiations in 2022 for a bilateral agreement under the U.S. Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act, which would enhance cross-border sharing of data between law enforcement agencies.
The latest U.S. Trafficking in Persons Report said that while Canada meets the minimum standards for combatting human trafficking, there are gaps in both police data collection and victims services and protections, with the latter deemed “inadequate.”
Chief U.S. border patrol agent Robert Garcia said in October in a social media post on X that agents in the Swanton Sector, which covers Vermont’s border with Quebec, apprehended more than 19,000 people from 97 countries in the last year — more than the last 17 years combined.
Cohen said there have also been “very significant conversation” during his tenure between federal, provincial, territorial and Indigenous leaders about addressing the issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, “which is another form of border control that is very important.”
At the same time, he pointed out Canada remains concerned about the smuggling of illegal firearms from the U.S., which officials say is the top source of guns used in crimes in Canada.
The current debate around border security has focused on irregular migration and fentanyl trafficking, after Trump vowed to lay 25-per cent tariffs on all goods from Canada and Mexico over the issue.
Cohen said those issues have also been concerns for Biden administration, and that diplomatic and top-level talks have “moved some of the levers” toward enhancing security.
Although encounters of migrants seeking to enter the U.S. through the Canadian land border saw a 306-per cent year-over-year increase in June, the number has since dropped by 50 per cent to 1,792 as of September, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics.
The agency says it seized more than 5,000 kilograms of illegal drugs at the Canadian border between October 2023 and September 2024. That included 19.5 kilograms of fentanyl — a more than 200 per cent increase from two years prior.
Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc told MPs last week that Canada will commit more personnel and equipment for border security before Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20.
Cohen said Trump’s proposed tariffs would have “significant economic impacts” on both sides of the border and could even increase inflation, which Trump has vowed to “get rid of.”
But the ambassador also pointed out it was too soon to say definitively what the impact could be — or even if the tariffs will happen at all.
“All we’ve seen about this policy is a one-paragraph Truth Social post, and that’s not a full policy,” he said. “It doesn’t capture necessarily what the tariffs would look like.
“You don’t impose tariffs by social media post.”
Survivors of sex trafficking looking for help can contact The Canadian Human Trafficking Hotline 24-7 at 1-833-900-1010.
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