Sex-worker law reform: Young lead way
Well, at least the Young Liberals of Canada have their heads screwed on right: They’re pushing the rest of their federal party to discuss decriminalization of prostitution at the party’s convention in April.
Utopian the young may be, but at least their vision is unimpaired by the cataracts of political palatability. Really, is there any other explanation for the unforgivable sloth shown on this file? Canadians, too, are unforgivably quiet. While mouths foamed angrily over electoral reform, a broken promise with negligible realworld consequences, prostitution law, left unreformed, is downright dangerous.
Since they were elected, the Liberals have claimed they’re reviewing Conservative-era legislation that reworked Canada’s sex work laws following the Supreme Court’s Bedford decision in 2013. That ruling declared that three sections of the Criminal Code made life more dangerous for those in the sex business and were therefore unconstitutional.
Little has happened since. Jody Wilson-Raybould’s spokesman, David Taylor, declined an interview request on behalf of the minister, emailing a statement instead that gave no indication change is imminent.
“We are dismayed to see so little action to date,” said another email, this one from Katrina Pacey, executive director of Vancouver’s PIVOT Legal Society, which was an intervener in the Bedford case. It is preparing, if needed, for another legal battle. In an ideal world, it wouldn’t come to that, though my National Post colleague John Ivison reports others are girding to fight too.
The fixes, legislatively, aren’t particularly complicated. The fundamental problem with the law right now is it criminalizes the purchase, but not the sale, of sex. At the time of the Bedford ruling, the actual sale and purchase of sex weren’t themselves illegal. Now, half of that transaction is.
The present law stampedes over the spirit of the Bedford decision. In the ruling, the bit of the Criminal Code that prevented communication for the purposes of prostitution was found unconstitutional because, to avoid police detection of said communication, the trade was plied in areas and ways that, writes Ontario Court of Appeal Justice James MacPherson, effectively eliminated “selfprotection options for prostitutes who are already at enormous risk.”
Continuing to criminalize any part of that exchange, as the Toryera law does, has the same effect as the provision that hampered communication.
The law is poor public policy, is disrespectful to the top court’s judgment and — completely separate of either of these very good reasons to object to it — insulting to those who work in the sex industry and can make their own choices about what they do with their bodies and how they make money.
The Ottawa Police Service, for example, still runs “john sweeps,” in which they net guys trying to buy sexual services and pack them off to a re-education evening with the Salvation Army. This is dangerous, pure and simple. It perpetuates the harms of unconstitutional law and maintains — intentionally or not — the conflation of trafficking, exploitation and consensual sex work.
During the Grey Cup celebrations, Ottawa and Gatineau cops raided 11 hotels, identifying 20 women and one man; no sex workers were arrested, but nothing about jackbooted cops storming into your room can be pleasant.
Yes, there is trafficking, but it is vastly different from prostitution as employment-by-choice, even if those choices are constrained by circumstance. Furthermore, a legal sex industry would make it easier to direct police resources where they’re needed — to help those who are being forced into the sex trade — and, decriminalization maintains laws against trafficking and abuse.
Changes to criminal law in Canada are the start, not the finish, of what to do about prostitution. Labour law, zoning changes to accommodate brothels, occupational health and safety decisions and unionization — these are the fights of the future. Or at least, they should be. We won’t ever get to them if the Liberals don’t decriminalize. That the Young Liberals are attempting to force the grown-ups in the party to confront this is encouraging.