Human traffickers are exploiting the country’s highways and airports, establishing corridors to move victims between major Canadian cities, shows new research on missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.

Researchers mapped these routes by examining thousands of sex advertisements posted online over the past decade. The analysts identified ads specifically claiming to feature Indigenous women or girls, then monitored changes to the posted locations of the ads in order to track the movement of victims.

The data suggests that traffickers are frequently using Ontario as a starting point. The most commonly used corridor in Canada is between Toronto and Vancouver. It is followed by Edmonton to Fort McMurray, Alta.; Calgary to Edmonton; and Belleville, Ont., to Edmonton.

These are among the key findings in a new report by Thomson Reuters – titled Unseen, Unknown, and Unsolved: Disappearances and Trafficking of Indigenous Individuals in Canada & the United States – set to be released Tuesday.

Heather Panton, the senior adviser for social impact and human rights at Thomson Reuters, said the aim with this report is to make hidden patterns visible. “We wanted to provide practical information that can help policymakers, law enforcements, non-profits and community partners with ways to better detect, prevent and respond to this exploitation,” she said in an interview.

The report, now in its second annual iteration, identified at least 38 active and unresolved disappearances of Indigenous women and girls across Canada from May of 2025 to March of 2026. As the researchers pored through a variety of sources to obtain that data – such as information from the Aboriginal Alert network, the RCMP and activist groups – they found that hotspots of disappearances have been emerging in the Greater Toronto Area and Prince George, B.C., and persist in communities in Manitoba and Alberta.

The 30-page report also highlighted how resource-extraction sites are playing a role in human-trafficking cases by spurring sex-buying demand in areas near major projects.

“Behind every record is a person, a family, a community that’s really seeking answers, protection and justice,” Ms. Panton said. (Woodbridge Co. Ltd., the Thomson family holding company and controlling shareholder of Thomson Reuters, also owns The Globe and Mail.)

For Deputy Grand Chief Anna Betty Achneepineskum of Nishnawbe Aski Nation, who represents 49 First Nations in Northern Ontario, it has been gratifying to see more attention being paid to the issues she has been raising for decades.

“We have long waited for governments and private companies to take this link between sex trafficking and our missing and murdered women seriously,” she said. “And while we have, of course, already shown them many numbers before, part of what all this new research is doing is that it helps us to tell them exactly what they should be working on, and where we need better policies and enforcement.”

Sex-ad analysis was a key tool used by Thomson Reuters researchers to investigate human trafficking because it allowed them to geographically plot the demand that fuels these networks.

For last year’s report, the researchers had collected 3,485 sex ads posted in Canada since 2016. The study concluded that a larger volume of sex ads was correlated with a higher number of cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. This year, they refreshed that data by collecting a further 313 sex ads from May of 2025 to March, 2026. These ads offered locations, phone numbers and photos of Indigenous women and girls. The researchers tracked how sex ads were posted for what appeared to be the same person in different cities, then analyzed changes to their advertised locations to map the most commonly used trafficking corridors in Canada.

They also learned other qualitative insights, such as how sex buyers on messaging boards in Canada are advising others to seek Indigenous women and avoid white women, because the latter are perceived to be more likely to be connected to law enforcement.

Researchers wrote in the report that “an unintended, problematic effect” of police sting operations involving white women may be “sex buyers seeking out Indigenous women due to a perceived lower risk associated with the Indigenous population.”

They noted that human trafficking is a particularly complex issue because it overlaps with broader societal concerns, such as drug addiction, poverty, homelessness, colonization and systemic discrimination. Often, researchers said, victims may not know or believe that they are being trafficked.

(Sex ads were considered to be a general indicator of human trafficking for the purposes of this analysis, which did not exclude ads that may have been for voluntary sex work. Researchers searched through posts to find those where someone was identified as Indigenous or Native American – meaning they may have missed ads where the ethnicity was not stated and simultaneously may have included those where the ethnicity was inaccurate.)

Winnipeg police are taking a tougher line against traffickers' use of rental platforms such as Airbnb. In this video, reporter Temur Durrani explains how, and looks at the case of one Quebec teenager who was trafficked.

The Globe and Mail

The Thomson Reuters report dovetails with a Globe investigation published last month that demonstrated the ways in which predators are utilizing short-term rental platforms as they move victims between cities. In one case, a Quebec teenager was pressured into providing sexual services to at least 50 men in the span of 15 days. She was taken westward from Montreal through Ontario – to Toronto, Sudbury, Timmins and Thunder Bay – before winding up in Manitoba, The Globe reported.** **

For their 2026 report, Thomson Reuters researchers examined data from the United States for the first time, which, Ms. Panton said, illustrates the borderless and transnational nature of these crimes.

The report found that Indigenous women and girls in the U.S. share similar vulnerabilities to those in Canada, and that both countries offer challenges to obtain data because neither maintains a unified government repository for these cases.

In many instances, analysts saw that phone numbers associated with sex ads in Canada were also used in ads in the U.S.

In doing their analysis, researchers found cases where ads for the same person were posted in locations separated by vast distances, such as Toronto and Vancouver, just a few days apart.

The movement of victims across such corridors highlights the need for more awareness at transit and transport checkpoints, Ms. Panton said. It also indicates that jurisdictions should be working more closely together to spot trafficking in well-known corridors, including by stationing dedicated personnel, she added.

Ms. Panton said last year’s edition of the report emphasized the importance of law enforcement incorporating sex-ad analysis into active investigations.

Earlier this year, in Minnesota – a jurisdiction that began to integrate sex-ad analysis into its work after the 2025 Thomson Reuters report – investigators found ads that were paramount in an active case. Shortly after a missing person’s report was filed for an Indigenous woman, they cross-referenced her photo to confirm that she had been trafficked. They located her safely and she is now back with her family.

Taylor Wencel, an intelligence specialist for the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives Office in Minnesota, said it is important to ensure that “no potential lead is overlooked in the pursuit of justice.”

“Every missing person deserves every available investigative resource,” he said in a statement. “Cross-referencing sex-ad data with missing persons cases has demonstrated its value by helping to identify individuals and generate leads that may not have been discovered through traditional approaches alone.”

The Minnesota example shows why sex-ad analysis should be added as a standard practice into similar investigations conducted by all police forces, Ms. Panton said.

Ms. Achneepineskum said she has been deeply worried about findings by Thomson Reuters related to Prince George, an outlier in their data. “I worry about what it says for our future,” she said.

In the rugged northern B.C. city, with a population of around 76,000 and an economy predicated on resource extraction, researchers found at least three cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls within a 10-month period.

Though one of the individuals was located safely, and thus did not make up the 38 disappearance cases included in the study, Ms. Panton said Prince George should be a warning sign for other areas with large resource-extraction projects.

Last year, Winnipeg-based EmpowerMen released a 96-page report about the linkage between the resource-extraction industry and sex trafficking, which Thomson Reuters referenced in its research. It showed how newly established industrial camps near construction sites – or “man camps,” as they are commonly called – have historically tolerated and led to the victimization of vulnerable women and girls.

Hennes Doltze, the project lead of EmpowerMen, said this matter goes to the heart of the problems associated with sex-buyer demand.

His small team of advocates works out of the Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata Centre, an Indigenous-led, community-based family resource centre in Manitoba. They are Canada’s leading group focusing on demand reduction for human trafficking.

“The influx of cash that comes in with these camps of men, away from families and willing to spend money, not only affects the population living nearby, but also makes these sites the perfect hotspot for the travelling networks of human traffickers,” Mr. Doltze said.

It’s important to educate men to challenge the norms of sexual exploitation, he said. “We hear often from men who have solicited prostitution that they didn’t know the woman or girl they were with was being trafficked,” he said. “But the majority don’t want to know – that’s their mindset. We have to work toward changing that as a society.”

Mr. Doltze believes the only reason sex trafficking exists is because there is a market for sex buyers. “If we’re able to create more policies and frameworks that directly address this issue of demand with these men, without fear or stigma and with direct intervention, we can prevent so much of this issue from proliferating the way it has.”

Last week, in Prince George, federal Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson attended an event for a $4-billion Enbridge natural gas pipeline expansion. As his news conference celebrated the start of construction at the site, absent were any details about protocols to combat human trafficking.

In a statement to The Globe, Mr. Hodgson’s office acknowledged that while infrastructure-related projects are able to “create significant economic opportunities and benefits, Indigenous communities have also raised concerns about the heightened risks of violence.”

“As Canada advances major resource and infrastructure projects, the Government recognizes the importance of working proactively with Indigenous partners, industry and other governments to help identify, prevent and address risks related to gender-based violence, human trafficking and community safety,” said the statement from Mr. Hodgson’s spokesperson Charlotte Power.

Enbridge spokesperson Gina Sutherland said the company implements rigorous training and extensive awareness measures to ensure there is “zero tolerance for harassment, exploitation, human trafficking or any other unlawful conduct” at its sites – particularly when large construction projects lead to many workers staying in temporary housing.

“Anyone who violates these policies is subject to disciplinary action, including immediate removal from a project and termination,” she wrote in a statement to The Globe.

In her small Anishinaabe community, just over 300 kilometres northeast of Thunder Bay, Chief Sheri Taylor of Ginoogaming First Nation has been inundated by smoke from recent wildfires nearby.

But she wants to be clear, she said: Her First Nation of about 1,030 people had already been under a local state of emergency since this past May because of “the cyclical issues” connected with missing and murdered women and girls.

“We have warned the provincial government and Ottawa about how our community – right next to the highway that links to Manitoba and the rest of the country, right next to a gold mine they’re making profit from – is vulnerable to human trafficking. Over and over again, we have made that clear,” she said.

“We need all Canadians to be aware and to stop treating our women like their lives don’t matter. We know awareness is key. And I’m hoping when people see this report that’s a step for that to actually happen now.”

Read the full Thomson Reuters report

Human trafficking: More from The Decibel

How do traffickers use short-term rental services, such as Airbnb and Vrbo, to do illicit business? And what can cities do to stop it? Reporter Temur Durrani spoke with The Decibel about the important takeaways from a court case in Winnipeg. Subscribe for more episodes.