Conceptual Failure: Comparing the Framings of Human Trafficking with Exploitation in the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) in Canada

Human trafficking and migrant labour exploitation are issues that, over the last several decades, have been much discussed, researched, and written about in academia, by NGOs, police, the media, and the public globally. Yet, there are significant discrepancies in how these issues are framed and understood across disciplines and by various organizations and actors. In particular, it is unclear how exploitation - the central concern in human trafficking - is understood in relation to exploitative practices in Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP). To this end, we conducted a knowledge synthesis project to compare and contrast the ways in which 'human trafficking', 'exploitation', and related terms are defined, distinguished, constructed, justified, and explained in Canadian academic and grey literature. Our research involved a scoping review of 217 data sources across three bodies of literature : 1) academic publications on human trafficking; 2) academic publications on the TFWP and migrant labour more generally; and 3) grey literature on human and/or labour trafficking and on the TFWP. We found that there was a lack of clarity and consistency across literature on use of the noted key terms. We further found that these key terms were often left under- or undefined. Attempts to define relied on secondary key terms that were themselves under- or undefined. Our findings offer important insights into the absence of uniformity in the understanding of trafficking and migrant labour exploitation, which often feeds into the myths and misinformation that are reproduced by the use of these terms in literature and practice. While we do not argue that uniformity in definitions is necessary for action, we show that the contradictions, inconsistencies, and inadequacies in the use of language around trafficking and migrant labour exploitation have coincided with responses that reproduce some of the harms they claim to address and require further scrutinization.