A couple who own a hotel in the rural municipality of Portage la Prairie have been charged with human trafficking following a months-long police investigation, where four employees from India reported being underpaid, forced to work 15-hour days and threatened with deportation.
Jai Inder Sandhu, 62, and Satbir Sandhu, 48, were charged with trafficking in persons and receiving material benefit from trafficking, Sgt. Cathy Farrell with the Manitoba RCMP human trafficking unit said at a Thursday news conference.
Jai Inder Sandhu was also charged with withholding or destroying documents and uttering threats.
Police did not identify the hotel by name, but CBC News confirmed Jai Inder Sandhu is an owner of the Howard Johnson hotel in Portage la Prairie.
CBC has reached out to Howard Johnson’s corporate office for comment.
The investigation began on Feb. 9, when Mounties got a call about a disturbance at the hotel west of Winnipeg, where the four employees lived and worked. Two female employees later came forward to report their situation to police, and another woman and a man were later also identified as victims, according to RCMP.
“Our goal from the outset was to help these victims of labour trafficking,” Farrell said.
“They all came to Canada in good faith believing they were going to work legally and be protected. Instead, they were threatened and forced to work for very little pay.”
Farrell said all four were promised fair wages, affordable living and legal work in Manitoba through federal labour market impact assessments — documents issued to employers by the federal government that allow them to hire foreign workers if they can’t find a Canadian or permanent resident to fill a position.
Until recently, those assessments both allowed foreign nationals to work legally in Canada and increased their chances of becoming permanent residents by adding points to their permanent residency applications.
In the Portage la Prairie case, while three of the employees eventually got the assessment document, which would have legalized their work, the employer didn’t meet the conditions outlined. Another of the employees never got one, RCMP said.
The employees reported being paid roughly half of Manitoba’s minimum hourly wage, and said they faced threats of deportation and other intimidation tactics. In one instance, one person said their identification documents were withheld from them, Farrell said.
The four did “pretty much everything” at the hotel, from working the front counter and the restaurant to doing housekeeping and cleaning duties. One person was recruited through friends of family, while others got involved through word of mouth or advertisements online. All had been working at the hotel for between 10 months and a year, Farrell said.
Victims urged to reach out for help
Janet Campbell, president and CEO of human trafficking awareness group the Joy Smith Foundation, encouraged people to get in touch with her organization to learn more about the topic and report potential trafficking cases.
“We certainly understand that reaching out for help isn’t always easy. When somebody has been isolated, threatened, misled, there’s a lot of fear and uncertainty that goes along with that, and what will happen to them if they speak up,” Campbell said at the news conference.
“I think if people understand the issue of forced labour more broadly, the community can be an incredibly powerful tool in the effort to identify these things and speak up.”
Dianna Bussey, executive director of correctional and justice services at the Salvation Army, said that organization is also involved in helping people exploited by traffickers, adding they’ve seen an increase in human trafficking cases, with the past year in particular a notable one for labour trafficking cases.
The RCMP’s Farrell said determining how common similar situations are is difficult, even though trafficking is an issue she described as “often hidden in plain sight.”
“There’s a lot of apprehension … [about] coming forward to the police,” she said. “It is one of the most underreported crimes that we have.”
Migrant workers, newcomers and vulnerable people are considered the most at-risk for labour trafficking, a form of human trafficking that involves recruiting, moving and holding victims to coerce them into working, she said.
That coercion often involves force, threats, mental and emotional abuse, and manipulation, said Farrell. Industries where it often happens include construction, agriculture, manufacturing, food processing, trucking and the restaurant business, she said.
Manitoba RCMP say two people have been charged in a labour trafficking investigation involving a hotel in the rural municipality of Portage la Prairie.
