How a Saskatchewan MLA helped free a Bangladeshi slave

Saskatchewan MLA Doug Steele and former MLA Hugh Nerlien, pictured, helped free a Bangladeshi woman who was a victim of human trafficking. Photo by Bill Brooks/Postmedia/File

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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“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.”

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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.

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

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

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

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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.

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“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.