I'm at a bit of a loss here to understand how advertising is really protective expression, in particular how profiting from running ads is protective expression. When I look at the kinds of ads that run in the Georgia Straight, our local free paper in Vancouver, the best estimate I have is from a few years ago. Someone tried to calculate how much they made, and it was at least $50,000 a week from that advertising.
I see advertising that is blatantly racist, and divides women by their ethnic categories and ascribes various kinds of servile categories to them based on race. I see advertising that reduces women to body parts so that they don't look like full human beings. I see a culture of advertising that, frankly, is harassing and demeaning to all Canadian women, but is enormously profitable to the organizations that carry it. I didn't expect to see this advertising provision in this bill, but it's a really important step to say that this kind of profiteering needs to stop.
Even in jurisdictions that have decriminalized prostitution, it varies, but there are often significant restrictions on advertising. We were talking about New Zealand, which doesn't permit the advertising of prostitution on television, on radio, and I don't think on billboards. It does permit it in print, and the advertising is done by the brothels, which are now offering coupons that you can clip for a discount and bring with you to the brothel. I don't see anything protective about that kind of expression, and I don't see what you can do through advertising that once that guy is with you alone in your apartment really makes any difference, whatever it is you've bargained for in advance.
I strongly support this provision and I think what's being done here is a prohibition on advertising and on the advertisers, who are profiting, with a clear exception that we're not going to criminalize prostituted women through the back door through an advertising provision, so they are exempted. I quite like the structure of this, and I think it is quite different from that communicating provision that effectively criminalizes all street prostitution taking place in residential areas and criminalizes the women for that, which I think is really a backwards move.