It’s almost here! To find out how to corporately sponsor our biggest event of the year, please contact our office! To purchase tickets, please click here.

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Thanks to your support, we raised over $5,000! 

Ray and Joanna were very popular at lunch time. Thanks for your help!

Peggy and Cathy (Board Member) kept watch to see who would win one of our famed Hole In One prizes. A few people came oh-so-close. Better luck next year!

Thank you to all our sponsors!

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After roughly six years of fundraising, planning and awareness promotion the Magdalene House Society is just about ready to open its doors. To celebrate this event, called The Sweet Tooth for Justice, as well as to promote their message of equality for all victims of human trafficking, Magdalene House is hosting a dessert gala on Feb. 21st in the Frontier Room at Westerner Park. The gala begins at 7:30 p.m. and there is no cost for admission. “We are celebrating the opening of the house for people who are in recovery from being trafficked. We have a home and we are just now in the process of furnishing it. We’ll be ready to receive clients by about March 1st,” said Dave Bouchard, president of the board of directors for Magdalene House Society. “We are currently in the process of hiring our staff who will be at the home 24/7. We will have enough space to accommodate five people who have been exploited by trafficking through a 12-month recovery program.” Bouchard said that the people living in the Magdalene House will receive counseling from Catholic Social Services as well as job skills training through Employment Placement Support Services. Additionally, he said that the residents will have access to online schooling to upgrade or participate in courses. “The main thing is that we are going to have a program where these people are busy all day long, doing various things that are going to contribute to their healing,” Bouchard said. “We have three full-time staff lined up, and three part-time staff, and then we’re hoping to have at least 10 volunteers. They will work through the daytime shift and the evening shift, but for the nightshift we probably won’t have any volunteers – unless we come across someone who really wants to do that.” The development of the Magdalene House has been in planning since 2009. The goal of the Society has been to secure funding for one year’s worth of operating expenses before opening. They have hosted various fundraisers and are exploring available funding from the government. “We do have an annual campaign that is ongoing to plan for next year. We’ve mailed out some cards to people who have supported us in the past, and people have been very generous in supporting us again and that’s been great,” Bouchard said. “We don’t have any government funding at this point but we hope to when we can show that our program is viable and that people are able to use this to help them recover and get back on their feet.” The Sweet Tooth for Justice gala falls a day shy of the annual day of Awareness for Human Trafficking. It will feature a variety of crafted desserts as well as a presentation by the Executive Director of the Centre to End All Sexual Exploitation in Edmonton, Kate Quinn. Quinn is an active human rights advocate in Edmonton and has previously worked on the National Task Force for Human Trafficking in Canada. She will discuss this initiative and her experiences working against human trafficking. “The night will start off with people enjoying some vary tasty desserts, and then we will have Kate Quinn do her presentation. After her presentation we will have a live auction, and the auction has theme-oriented desserts. For instance, people will make cupcakes into the shape of Oscar the Grouch, or they might make a theme cake that has to do with the movie Frozen. There are different possibilities that will be auctioned off,” Bouchard said. “After the auction, people will enjoy some more desserts. Then there will be a silent auction where people can view items donated by the community during the evening until it closes after the live auction.” Following the live and silent auctions, there will be the official ribbon cutting for the Magdalene House to end the evening.

Read the story at the Red Deer Express

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Make this your own commitment!

Leaders of the world’s largest faiths have come together in a way that has never happened before in history. Their focus is to end slavery. Committed to the dignity and freedom that is the birthright of all humankind, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jewish leaders are joining arms to once and for all eradicate modern slavery.

This is the start of something big, born of the notion that our collective dignity is bound up in the freedom of those enslaved and abused by the few who would presume to own another. Can you join me to step up and unite to end slavery once and for all?

Learn more and sign the Declaration here:          www.globalfreedomnetwork.org

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The low success rate in human trafficking charges is raising questions about the way those laws are being applied.

“It is really tricky. There are a lot of grey areas,” said Karlee Anne Sapoznik, head of the Alliance Against Modern Slavery, a Canadian non-profit advocacy group. “If you look at the difference between Canada and the United States, it’s quite shocking the success rates for convictions for trafficking.”

Police and the Crown have two forms of legislation to jail people who exploit others to sell sex: prostitution and trafficking laws.

The jury remains out on its effectiveness and necessity of Canada’s new prostitution law that came out last weekend.

The country’s trafficking laws were beefed up in 2005 and with a push from women’s advocates, police began several years ago to use the laws to target homegrown pimping and sex-trade rings.

But it’s difficult to put traffickers behind bars in Canada because of a lack of police resources and judges who aren’t aware of the subtleties of sex trafficking, Sapoznik said.

Women are often lured into prostitution over time by men pretending to be boyfriends, not even recognizing at first they are victims, Sapoznik notes.

At some point, the women realize the relationship has turned from what they thought was consensual and equal to being forced provide sex for money and shipped from city to city, she said.

By the time a woman gains the resolve to leave, she may be traumatized after years of being a slave.

The trauma can make a victim a less than ideal witness in a courtroom, and there can be difficulty in pinpointing when exactly she became an unwilling prostitute.

“There is a lack of training with judges on what human trafficking looks like so they understand the key aspects of the situation,” Sapoznik said.

The seriousness of the crime itself presents a challenge to police and prosecutors.

“Human trafficking charges are more serious in nature. They have a higher threshold in prosecution and higher penalties,” said Det. Sgt. Peter Casey of the York Regional police drugs and vice unit.

By comparison, prosecutors can prove a pimp is living off the avails of prostitution with evidence of renting several hotel rooms and keeping large amounts of cash on hand, Casey said.

“It’s very difficult to prove human trafficking cases without the victim’s co-operation and full details in terms of everything that has occurred,” he said. “Victims are under huge duress.”

The RCMP’s 2013 report on domestic sex trafficking notes that in many cases across Canada, prosecutors drop specific human trafficking charges because the victim won’t co-operate.

Police will often find young women in motel rooms, whom they suspect are victims of human trafficking, but they can’t force the women to report a crime, Const. Ken Steeves said.

They only hope the more often someone goes to jail on charges from human trafficking, even if it’s not on specific human trafficking charges, more victims will come forward.

BY THE NUMBERS

112: specific human trafficking charges for sex trade within Canada, as of February 2013 (RCMP)

35: specific human trafficking convictions from 2005 to 2013

126: number of victims involved

9: under age of 18

1 day to nine years: sentences handed out

80: cases before courts as of 2013

Source: Toronto Sun

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