Abstract Only two cases of migrant trafficking have been successfully prosecuted in Canada ( R v. Gonzalez-Valbuena and R v. Domotor ). This article considers why by offering a comparison of human trafficking offences defined at section 118 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) and sections 279.01-279.011 of the Criminal Code of Canada (CrC). We also assess the application of these provisions to seven publicly reported cases of migrant trafficking. We demonstrate that the anti-trafficking frameworks fail to capture the offence of migrant trafficking. We also confirm that the prosecution of migrant trafficking is undermined by the promotion of racist and gendered ideas of victimization in judicial decision making. Our analysis offers support for the work of Nandita Sharma (2005) on the existence of “global apartheid” in the Canadian context, which operates to sustain the illegalization, criminalization and removal of specifically racialized female migrants from Canada.
Templeman et al. (2026) studied this question.