China at the top of the offenders list of human trafficking in Canada.

According to the first national statistics on the extent of human trafficking in Canada, the top four worst offenders in international human trafficking here are China, Romania, the Philippines and Moldova.

Noticeably, the 31 foreign nationals (four of them being minor children) who came to attention of the Canadian Immigration officials between May 2006 and May 2008, actually represents a small fraction of the total number of victims.

Of these 31 foreign nationals, 12 were granted temporary residents permits (TRPs), seven were not granted TRPs, the TRP of one of them was cancelled, and one of them went missing. The remaining ten of them have their cases pending, or they have obtained another form of immigration status.

University of B.C. law Professor Benjamin Perrin said that this is the tip of the trafficking iceberg. Benjamin has served as a senior adviser to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration and is also a leading expert on the issue of human trafficking.

The most number of victims to Canada were contributed by China, with a total of 11 confirmed trafficking cases. Four of these confirmed cases came from Romania, three from the Philippines and three from Moldova, which is an Eastern Bloc country known for organized crime.

Perrin noted that according to the research into trafficking, most of the 31 cases that are were recognized in Canada, although not formally identified by gender, constituted of women and children trafficked into the sex trade or forced labour.

Perrin got the details of the statistics under the Access to Information Act. He will present his findings at a national conference on human trafficking that is set to begin on Wednesday in Vancouver, and is hosted by the B.C. Office to Combat Trafficking in Persons.

The RCMP has appointed human trafficking coordinators in every region of the country and these have been training police and communicating with non-governmental organizations and provincial government strategies. However, Canada lacks a national strategy in order to combat human trafficking, despite the federal Interdepartmental Working Group on Trafficking in Persons.

Perrin said that one of the confirmed cases was from China and that was of an 18-year-old young boy, whom RCMP has identified as a trafficking case. In spite of this, Canada Immigration didn’t allow to boy to stay in Canada and the whereabouts of that child is still unknown, he added.