Transport Canada is being urged to make it mandatory for flight attendants to take training to spot potential signs of human trafficking, similar to what U.S. airlines must do.

Activists say an incident earlier this year points to the need for widespread training.

Shelia Fedrick was working on an Alaska Airlines flight from Seattle to San Francisco when she noticed a dishevelled girl aged 14 or 15 sitting beside a well-dressed older man on the flight, NBC reported.

Fedrick tried to make conversation with the pair, but the man answered for the girl and became defensive. When the girl went to the bathroom, she wrote “I need help” on a piece of paper for Fedrick to see. The flight staff called law enforcement, who met them at the gate when the flight arrived. It turned out she was a human trafficking victim.

People who are being trafficked, or are at risk of being trafficked, may not speak English, may not know where they are going or who is picking them up, might show signs of physical abuse, look fearful or nervous, or have someone who is in possession of their documents and insists on speaking for them, activists say.

When Timea Nagy, a Hungarian-Canadian, got on a plane by herself to fly to Toronto from Budapest in 1998, she didn’t know who would be picking her up at the airport. But Nagy, 20 at the time, had been promised a well-paying job so she came to Canada anyway. Upon arrival at Pearson, she was immediately taken to a motel where she was forced into the sex trade for nearly three months until she escaped.

Her ordeal was investigated by Toronto police, and she has since become a speaker and activist.

Nagy believes that by asking a few questions and watching out for key behaviours, flight attendants could determine when an individual is being trafficked and intervene.

“Education of the flight attendants can prevent a girl from turning into me,” Nagy said this week in an interview.

Marie-Anyk Côté of Transport Canada said training to spot signs of human trafficking is at the discretion of the airlines.

Out of four major Canadian airlines that the Star contacted, only Air Canada said their employees are given trafficking awareness training when they are hired. WestJet said their staff is trained to report suspicious activity to corporate security. Air Transat and SunWing weren’t available for comment.

“I believe Canadian flight attendants should have more training on how to recognize and address human trafficking,” said Marie-Hélène Major, president of the Air Canada component of the Canadian Union of Public Employees.

Nancy Rivard, the president and founder of Airline Ambassadors International, an American organization that trains airline personnel to identify and address instances of human trafficking, said their training has helped in the U.S.

The group’s training takes about and hour and a half and is split into three parts, Rivard said. In the training, the flight attendants get an education on the issue, the effects of trafficking on victims and the indicators that flight staff should look out for.

The U.S. is more advanced in anti-trafficking measures than Canada, with initiatives that are supported by Congress, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Department of Homeland Security and non-governmental organizations, Rivard said.

Rivard’s group worked with several members of Congress and succeeded in getting regulations into the FAA last year to make the training mandatory for flight attendants. They are working to expand the guidelines to cover all flight personnel.

The group started the training in 2011 and they have since trained about 5,000 personnel. Rivard said the Department of Homeland Security doesn’t share data with them on whether the training has increased the number of incidents that are reported, but she believes there are “more and more reports every day,” based on a survey that AAI recently sent out to flight attendants working in the States.

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Rivard said she’s interested in bringing the training to Canada.

“We’re really hoping to inspire Canada to take a more proactive approach when it comes to training in the transportation industry,” Rivard said. “This is a solution that won’t cost a lot of money, there’s infrastructure in place to train all airline staff, adding the subject of human trafficking awareness won’t cost anything basically.”