Thank you.
Thank you for inviting our organization to come before the committee today. The Providing Alternatives Counselling and Education Society, by, with, and for sex workers, provides peer-driven violence prevention and support services for sex workers in Vancouver, British Columbia. We're located in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood and have been providing services for the past 20 years. We operate under a non-judgmental, asset-based, and harm reduction model that recognizes the human rights of sex workers—female, trans, and male. This approach is based on self-identified needs.
Our sex worker-driven approach reflects an international movement that includes groups, such as Maggie's, in Toronto; Stella, in Montreal; POWER, in Ottawa; and the Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform. This movement emerged in response to the discrimination, violence, and persecution that sex workers experience due to stigmatization, and laws criminalizing sex work and sex workers.
Since the beginning, this movement has sought to address the inequalities that sex workers experience under the law. Our organization was an intervenor in Bedford v. Canada. Our violence prevention coordinator, Sheri Kiselbach, who I will have the pleasure of introducing to you shortly, along with Pivot Legal Society and sex workers united against violence, had previously launched a parallel constitutional challenge of Canada's sex work laws.
While we met the Bedford decision with great joy, knowing, in the words of Valerie Scott, that sex workers have for the first time been recognized as persons under the law, we are steadfast in our opposition to Bill C-36. As the committee has heard from our sister sex worker organizations, legal advocacy groups, and researchers, Bill C-36 will recreate the devastating harms that sex workers have experienced under the laws that were struck down in the Bedford decision. In pushing sex workers into unsafe settings and undermining their ability to screen clients, Bill C-36 will create the conditions that will lead to more murdered and missing women.
We're not recommending any amendments to Bill C-36 because, in short, we believe that the legislation is fatally flawed. Echoing previous testimony by Pivot Legal, the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, and others, it would not withstand a constitutional challenge. As we know from past experience, constitutional challenges take years to wind their way through the courts. Let me be clear. It is absolutely unacceptable that sex workers in our community and across Canada be subjected to untold violence due to laws that are unconstitutional.
We call upon the committee and the government to reject this bill in its entirety until the current laws expire in December. However, we acknowledge that the government is unlikely to do so. We, therefore, call upon the government to immediately refer Bill C-36 to the Supreme Court and publicly release all legal opinions that the government has solicited on the bill.
Given that the minister has publicly acknowledged that Bill C-36 will face a future constitutional challenge, the government should recognize the critical importance of expediting this legal process. After all, I cannot stress this enough. The government is obligated to pass laws that comply with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. If instead the government continues to pursue legislation that recreates conditions that perpetuate violence, then they will be inflicting structural violence on sex workers in Canada.
Now it's my pleasure to introduce Sheri Kiselbach, PACE's violence prevention coordinator. For more than 40 years, Ms. Kiselbach has been involved in the sex industry, first as a sex worker, and now as an advocate and educator. Ms. Kiselbach is a national expert in violence prevention among sex workers and has worked tirelessly to promote sex worker rights in Canada. Ms. Kiselbach's experiential knowledge, wisdom, and expertise are precisely what should have informed the legislative process, had the government been committed to advancing a bill that respects the human rights and dignity of sex workers.