Simons: ‘It’s going to be a disaster’ — Peter MacKay’s proposed prostitution law defies the court and common sense
EDMONTON - Elizabeth Wilson, 30, got her start as a sex trade worker in Australia, where brothels are legal.
“How the clients there respected the girls was hugely different from here,” Wilson says.
In Australia, she says, brothels were clean and safe. Workers were tested for sexually transmitted infections every three months. Customers had to submit to health checks every time they arrived. Security guards were always at hand.
Since returning to Edmonton, Wilson has worked as an escort and in massage studios. Many of her regulars, she says, are “super-lovely.” But she’s never felt as safe as she did in Australia.
In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down Canada’s prostitution laws as unconstitutional because they forced workers into unsafe conditions. Wilson hoped Canada might adopt Australia’s model. Then federal justice minister Peter MacKay, the new Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons.
“I’m appalled by it, to be blunt. It is shocking. What the government did was to read the Supreme Court decision, and change the language to make things more unsafe. Driving things underground is going to make things far more dangerous. It’s going to be a disaster.”
Prostitution is legal in Canada. The new law would radically change that, making it a crime, for the first time, for anyone to purchase any sexual services. It would make it a crime to offer sexual services in a public place if people under the age of 18 could be present. It would also make it illegal to advertise “sexual services.” The bill puts such ads on the same legal footing as child pornography, giving the court power to compel “custodians of computer systems” to delete all ads for sexual services from the Internet.
“If I can’t advertise, how am I supposed to get clients?” asks Wilson, who currently uses Twitter, Facebook, and her own website for self-promotion. “A lot of girls are going to say, ‘Well, I’m going to back out onto the streets.’”
Emily Hill is a former Edmontonian, who now works as a lawyer with Aboriginal Legal Services in Toronto. She was one of the interveners in the earlier Supreme Court case, Canada v Bedford.
Her clients aren’t high-priced escorts. Most are “survival” sex workers, driven into prostitution by poverty and addiction. They’re the ones this new law purports to protect. But Hill, too, opposes Bill C-36.
She says the law is likely unconstitutional, since it does little to make sex work safer, and challenges Charter of Rights protections for freedom of speech. Beyond that, she believes criminalizing the purchase of sex will make street customers more skittish and nervous, more likely to pressure women to jump into cars quickly. And since it will be crime to solicit in a public place, they’ll be forced into dark, dangerous places, far from watching community eyes.
“There will probably be a court challenge. But meanwhile, the very people the Supreme Court said were at risk will continue to be at risk, while the lawyers sort out what is constitutional.”
But Kate Quinn, the executive director of CEASE, the Centre to End All Sexual Exploitation, and a longtime Edmonton advocate for street workers, has a different perspective.
“This is a moment in history that we have never had before. This is a call to Canadians to say we will not stand for the exploitation of vulnerable people or people in vulnerable situations.”
Also take note of the comments after the article. The public is not pleased with the direction the Harper government is taking. It's evident their polls were fixed and tax payer's money wasted.
