Justice committee  I would suggest that they're not totally sufficient and that there needs to be more opportunity for folks to avail themselves of the services that are needed to support those with addictions and mental health problems. We see that in our industry every day of the week.

Justice committee  I'm looking from a positive perspective here at the fact that it's a start. I'm not sure, quite frankly, if it is enough. That's why I said in my comments that it's a good start. I think that once there's some further evaluation of the possible usage, then one would have a better

Justice committee  As I said, we have never charged a prostitute under that particular section of the code. We use it as a tool to help us get to much bigger things.

Justice committee  It's a summary conviction offence, as written in Bill C-36.

Justice committee  Yes.

Justice committee  No.

Justice committee  No, you're absolutely right. For us to suss out an individual who we think is exploited sometimes takes weeks and sometimes takes months. For us to engage ourselves in what an individual may be up to and in our ability to build trust and confidence—which is so important for us, s

Justice committee  That's the tool piece; that's what opens the door for us. We use the section in the code to give us the authorities to interject ourselves into a process and then determine where it will take us. In most cases, it takes us on a much lengthier route whereby we start to find out th

Justice committee  Thank you. Police officers do have the discretion to lay charges. Although that discretion is not absolute, we do have the ability to decide, based on factors, if we wish to move forward with arrest and charge or not. In this particular case, we use the power of sections in the

Justice committee  I can tell you that in our business we can't do it alone, so we have partnered with many social service agencies to help us, for us to have the ability to point individuals in a different direction. Some of those partners have spoken here before to this committee, and we value th

Justice committee  We would lose the procuring piece. We would lose the communicating piece. For us, we need these tools to be able to find out what's going on in this business. As I said, we're always trying to find out if individuals have been victimized and without those tools we don't have the

Justice committee  We have commodification of sexual activity, presumption of financial benefit, procuring, and advertising. We're able to look at each of those things in their individual subset and determine if there are activities going on around that.

Justice committee  We could do that before, but this gives us some more authorities to continue on.

Justice committee  It just provides us with the further tools to do the job.

Justice committee  That is correct, in the last five years we have not charged one.