Hi there. My name is Jean McDonald. I'm the executive director of Maggie's: The Toronto Sex Workers Action Project, an organization that's run for and by sex workers, and is the oldest of its kind in Canada.
Our mission is to assist sex workers in their efforts to live and work with safety and dignity. Maggie's is a harm reduction agency primarily funded through the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care. We provide safer sex and safer drug use supplies, education and support, and have had several thousand client contacts in the last year. We do front-line work and our service users are predominantly street-based sex workers. Many are lower income, indigenous, of colour and/or transgendered.
Since the legislation was introduced we've held many consultations with our service users, who unanimously reject this bill. They believe it will not ensure their safety or their security. Instead they say it will push them further into harm's way, continuing the epidemic of violence against sex workers in Canada. They are gravely worried about their own safety and worried that more of their friends will go missing, be assaulted, raped or murdered.
Recreating the same harms of the old legislation struck down by the Supreme Court, Bill C-36 will continue to allow violent predators like Robert Pickton to prey on sex workers who have been pushed into less public areas of the city, unable to screen their potential clients and unable to work together. This is why many people have taken to calling Bill C-36 the Pickton model.
The debate here should not be about choice or about whether violence happens to sex workers. We know violence happens to sex workers. We want to address that violence. Instead it should be about the best ways to ensure safety and security and access to services such as police, if necessary, for sex workers.
Bill C-36 does not do this. It both indirectly and directly punishes sex workers by making prostitution illegal, as Peter MacKay confirmed this morning. Criminalization breeds isolation and isolation, in turn, breeds vulnerability to violence, exploitation, and abuse. Instead of working to de-stigmatize prostitution and to see sex workers as part of Canadian society, Bill C-36 will make it difficult and unsafe for sex workers to reach out to community services, to family and friends, or even to police for assistance. In fact, proposed subsection 213(1.1), which criminalizes communication, will give police considerable powers to continue to target and harass sex workers. Communication is one of the key means by which street-based sex workers are able to screen their clients, to see if a client may be intoxicated or sober, to negotiate rate, services, and safer sex practices.
Criminalizing the purchase of sex, as studies from Sweden have shown, will not protect sex workers nor will it reduce demand. When clients are criminalized they are also less likely to assist sex workers who may be exploited or abused because those clients themselves will fear arrest. As well, criminalizing the purchase of sex in effect results in a de facto criminalization of the sale of sex.
Working indoors has been demonstrated to enhance sex workers' ability to control their work conditions and to negotiate safer sex practices, yet Bill C-36 impedes the ability to work indoors because it bans advertising and criminalizes the purchase of sexual services. Instead of criminalizing prostitution, the Government of Canada should listen to what sex workers have been saying for more than 30 years and what sex worker groups the world over unanimously agree will increase the safety and security of sex workers, and that is decriminalization.
Systems of decriminalization, such as the Prostitution Reform Act 2003 in New Zealand, allow sex workers to have the same labour protections and legal rights as any other person in the country. Studies of decriminalization in New Zealand have shown an improvement in working conditions, a decrease in violence, and an increase in the ability for sex workers to negotiate safer sex practices.
There are already provisions in the Criminal Code pertaining to forced labour, forcible confinement, kidnapping, sexual assault, statutory rape, theft, and physical assault. Should sex work be decriminalized, none of these very important aspects of the Criminal Code will be affected. In fact, sex workers will have a greater ability to access and to charge people who may be doing these things to them.
At Maggie's, we believe that Bill C-36 must be scrapped in its entirety. In its place, a system of decriminalization should be developed to provide sex workers with the same labour, legal, and human rights as any other person in Canada.
We support the move from legislation that is moralist to one that is based on human rights and on health and safety standards. At Maggie's, we see the decriminalization of prostitution as an essential part of our overall harm reduction strategy.
Thank you.