The people who bring them in tell the women that if they go to the authorities, they will be deported. Most of them have nothing to return to, and they’ve spent any money they might have had to get to Canada. So they’re trapped. There are also threats of violence to keep them even more in line.

Most human trafficking into Canada is for the purposes of sexual exploitation. We don’t have nearly as many illegal sweatshop workers as we have women working in “massage parlours” and other places as prostitutes against their will (a lot of these women—and children—are smuggled in from Asia).

We do have sweatshops too, don’t get me wrong. In places like Vancouver and Toronto, some garment plants and other manufacturing facilities operate in questionable conditions, and, of course, there’s the sweatshop-like practice of “piece work.” But our biggest abuse of underground, illegal workers is in the sex trade.

Catherine: Oh, ratzin fratzin I can’t even buy Italian anymore? I guess it’s back to secondhand for me (Ebay, thrift stores). I know it sounds gross, but secondhand doesn’t have to be yukky. I have about 10 pair of business pumps and loafers (barely worn) that I found at my local Goodwill.

That, and find a good cobbler if you can. Repair, don’t replace! There’s a Russian dude one town over from me who’s been reconstructing my shoes and boots for almost 20 years. I actually have shoes/boots that are almost 30 years old.

I don’t know what to say about the athletic shoes. Secondhand sneakers really would be gross, though I did find a cool pair of (designer!) yoga shoes at the Goodwill, probably dropped off by a woman who planned to work out but never got around to it. I deal with my athletic-shoe shortage by working out barefoot (jogging on my trampoline at home, jogging on the beach, whatevah) whenever I can, and saving my 10 year old sneaks for gymwear only. I hate spending money on athletic footwear; the sweatshop issue always gives me agita.

And before youall start telling me about all these great new medications that will cure my toenail fungus, read the fine print. That stuff is hell on your liver

I, too, have been using the hold-it-at-bay method as I wait for BigPharma to solve this problem in a non-liver damaging way. Per the L.A. Times, there’s hope; they say: New, deep-reaching topical treatments are being tested: Small molecules in one lacquer, right now known only as AN2690, slip more easily through tough nail layers and deliver fungicide to the skin beneath. Clinical trials are ongoing; preliminary results found that about half of nails treated daily for six months ended up growing fungus-free. So, I guess there’s about 50% worth of hope.

The Animal Medical Center is a veterinary teaching hospital here in NYC, open 24/7 and just a frantic, 2AM cab-ride away. It’s a miserable glorious place where on the same night I saw four people in a rugby scrum rush a pug with an oxygen mask on through the waiting room (apparently there is an animal ambulance service here), and a Jordin Sparks-like giantess (but not as giant as me) pull a ferret out of her bosom and stand weeping and cradling the long scrap of panting fur.

It’s traditional to speed up on the ring roads around Manhattan so as to keep people terrified of driving into Manhattan and many’s the time I’ve been hurtling down the FDR Drive at a terrific pace and turned my head to see into the very exam room at the Animal Medical Center where Doug died.

As I’ve been saying to Miss Patsy for the last three years as her ancient poodle tramps over us all night long and pees on his feet: After 12 years, every day is frosting and gravy my dear, frosting and gravy.

Congratulations on more frosting and gravy.

yrs, B. Dagger Lee

Seconding Artemis’s point about sweatshops, and adding, particularly, that “Made In Italy” is absolutely no guarantee of sweatshop-free: quite the opposite, in fact.

Clothes and shoes that claim to be made in Italy are usually cut and assembled in non-EU Eastern European countries, where wages are low and labour rights minimal. They are then shipped to Italy, where a production line of better-paid Italian workers literally just stick the label on them. The fact that this label-sticking is defined as a manufacturing process, and it occurs in Italy, legally entitles the company to describe the shoe/garment as “Made In Italy”.

Even things that are fully made in Italy are generally made in the south, which is full of illegal-immigrant-staffed sweatshops, with a great deal of investment and much of the administration supplied by the Mafia and Triad gangs.

Most first-world countries (US, UK, mainland Europe, Australia) have serious problems with under-the-radar immigrant labour, often staffed by human trafficking and indenture, in illegal sweatshops. (I understand that the problem is smaller, though by no means nonexistent, in geographically peripheral countries such as Canada, Scandinavia, NZ.) Felicity Lawrence’s recent book on supermarkets estimated that about 30% of the UK food industry depends on this sort of exploitation. I’m unsure of the precise stats for the clothing industry, but it’s certainly an enormous problem, especially in Italy and Spain. Stick “Italy sweatshops” into Google and you’ll see what I mean.

Sorry to be lining up with another bucket of cold water to chuck over the shoe party. But, if you’re paying a higher price for Italian or Spanish goods on the grounds that you assume the difference is going to the workers, you should know that it most definitely is not. Sweatshop-free shoes are actually quite hard to come by, unless you’re prepared to shop on the internet (always a problem with shoes, because trying them on is so important), or you live in a very large city like London, Paris, NY etc that actually has bespoke shoemakers and fairtrade shops.

Obviously, IBTP for making shoe-buying both an ethical and a physical discomfort.