How a Saskatchewan MLA helped free a Bangladeshi slave

A Saskatchewan court has convicted two men of human trafficking in an unprecedented case that saw two MLAs intervene to free a Bangladeshi woman from modern slavery.

Last week, Saskatchewan’s Court of King’s Bench convicted two men, a 55-year-old and a 44-year-old, of forcing a Bangladeshi national to work long hours in rural restaurants for little to no pay, and keeping her in conditions the court described as “squalid.” The 44-year-old also coerced the woman into sex on multiple occasions.

“I do not have any reasonable doubt about the guilt of either,” Judge Miguel Martinez wrote in the Aug. 7 decision convicting both men of human trafficking, according a report by SaskToday. The 44-year-old was additionally convicted of three counts of sexual assault.

The victim’s identity is protected by a publication ban.

The nearly year-and-a-half-long trial garnered outsized attention in Saskatchewan due in part to the central involvement of two provincial politicians who mounted a covert campaign to contact and ultimately rescue the woman after she reached out for help.

Doug Steele is a veteran grain farmer who became a Saskatchewan Party MLA in 2016.

He first became acquainted with the complainant in 2022 after she contacted his Gull Lake, Sask., constituency office and tried to explain, in broken English, that she was being exploited by the owners of a diner.

Steele was a frequent patron at the diner, and had reportedly handed his business card to her upon noticing that she seemed distant and forlorn, urging her to get in touch with any problems.

“This was outside the kind of case we usually deal with,” Steele testified last year, according to a report by Golden West Broadcasting. “But once she called us, I felt a responsibility. She was alone out there.”

When the woman was subsequently shuffled out of town to another restaurant in Saskatchewan, this led to Steele recruiting a second MLA, the since-retired Hugh Nerlien.

Nerlien visited the restaurant and clandestinely handed the woman a printed-out list of social services contacts.

“Clandestinely, I passed the note to her with my business card,” Nerlien testified last May, according to CTV.

Nerlien said the woman warned him that if her boss inquired what the list contained, he was to say it was “garbage.”

When the woman was moved yet again, to another restaurant, Steele arranged a March 23, 2023 operation that involved a constituency assistant intercepting the woman in her unfinished basement accommodations and driving her to a women’s shelter.

“The downstairs was a wooden staircase, which lead to an unframed cement floor basement, which was cold, with very little lighting. In that basement there was a shower that did not have walls around … shower didn’t have a curtain on it either,” the assistant, Sean Checkley, told the court last year according to a report by CTV.

Only then did staff at the shelter involve RCMP, who opened an investigation into the two men.

Last September, the Saskatchewan NDP criticized Steele’s involvement in the case, and even called for his removal as Government Caucus Chair under Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe.

“He didn’t contact the police or authorities despite admitting to fearing for her safety. He kept no record of casework, documenting his interactions with her, and he solicited assistance from unrelated parties like another MLA and a political staffer instead of actually taking things to the RCMP,” Brittney Senger, the NDP’s Shadow Minister for Ethics & Democracy, said at the time.

The woman was described in court proceedings as a Bangladeshi national who came to Toronto in 2022 on a visitor’s visa with the intention of obtaining a work permit to stay permanently. According to court testimony, the 55-year-old recruited the woman and brought her to Saskatchewan, where she mostly worked without any kind of work permit.

The case is the first of its kind to ever hit a Saskatchewan court, a fact in keeping with a generalized increase in human trafficking cases all across the country.

In December, an analysis by Statistics Canada found that police-reported human trafficking incidents have tripled in just the last 10 years, rising from about 200 in 2014 to 600 by 2024.

In a press briefing after the case’s final arguments, Crown prosecutor Leslie Dunning said it was the first instance of employment trafficking to be tried in Saskatchewan.

“This case certainly sets a precedent for human trafficking cases because we don’t have written decisions in our province,” she said.

Human trafficking trials are so rare in Saskatchewan that all the case precedent had to be cited from decisions in Ontario.

Dunning added that she hoped the result “hopefully would be a deterrent” to any other human traffickers.