Good morning, and thank you for having me here today to speak to you on Bill C-36.
My name is Rudi Czekalla Martínez, and I am the principal at Municipal Policy Consultants in Toronto, Ontario. I have been involved in the development of public policy in the area of adult entertainment both as a regulator and a private consultant for almost 15 years.
I'm also the author of the “Enhanced Adult Services Study” that Mr. Lambrinos referred to.
From my experience I can tell you that although the federal government lays out the regulatory framework for prostitution in this country, it is actually the municipalities that have the greatest impact on how prostitution is managed. This is the case because irrespective of what the federal government does, prostitution finds a way to continue to exist. It may transform its modus operandi to accommodate legislation, but it never goes away. Municipalities understand this very well and they have responded in a number of ways.
In Vancouver, Calgary, and Edmonton, municipal authorities have been licensing escort services for more than a decade. Not unlike the businesses themselves, which carefully set up their operations to make sure they don't technically run afoul of the law, these municipalities have carefully worded their own bylaws to ensure that they do not directly contradict the criminal laws, while at the same time indirectly regulate the business of prostitution.
So you see, we have a situation in which the different levels of government are not working together effectively to come up with a realistic, practical, balanced, and of course, constitutionally valid solution.
The model proposed in Bill C-36 does nothing to alleviate this matter. Aside from not responding to the issues raised by the Supreme Court, it also does nothing to help the provinces, and ultimately municipal governments, to deal with the real issues: the safety of the women involved in prostitution; their social marginalization; and their economic disenfranchisement. These are all things created by current as well as the proposed legislation.
The study I conducted includes 103 key findings and nine major recommendations, with 37 actionable items. In the short time I have before you, I would like to provide you with a synopsis of the study's recommendations and approach to their implementation.
First and foremost, an effective model needs to have outcome-based objectives against which the effectiveness of the approach is measured. Of course this means having valid and reliable metrics, which in turns means that there has to be relevant, consistent, and timely data available.
In Sweden, the government set as one of its objectives to reduce the violence against prostitutes. As several independent studies have pointed out, the government then went on to claim that it was achieving its goal because there were fewer prostitutes working on the streets, which was then interpreted to mean that there was less prostitution overall, and therefore less violence as well.
The government in Sweden never had valid and reliable metrics. It simply made very fallible assumptions. In fact, what has happened in Sweden is that the legislation there has simply driven prostitution deeper underground, not reducing levels in any significant way. By doing so it has also made it more dangerous, as sex worker focus groups have revealed.
Here at home, police services, from the RCMP all the way to the local police forces, don't keep the kind of data that is needed to ensure that we are measuring what needs to be measured. So the centralization of data collection by law enforcement authorities is one of the central recommendations of the study.
Another set key recommendation from the study focuses on the need to employ a harm reduction approach. We know that criminalization, whether explicit as in the United States or implicit as has been the case in Canada, and would continue to be so under the proposed legislation, simply doesn't work. We therefore need to focus on reducing individual, group, and social harm. This can only be done by redressing the laws and institutionalized norms that systematically victimize sex workers. Human trafficking, sexual exploitation, physical and psychological violence, social marginalization, and economic disenfranchisement are all issues that have to be addressed through a balanced combination of regulation and supports.
An excise tax on services would go a long way to pay for such programs.
Finally, the study makes a case for having all levels of government explicitly working together to come up with a strategy that does what I have just described. For each issue and sub-issue, there will almost always be a level of government that will be the lead and have the other orders of government play supporting roles. Without an explicit implementation plan, driven by specific outcomes and validated by specific measures, any attempt at addressing prostitution risks becomes just another ambiguously unsuccessful attempt in a long line of similar attempts at dealing with this issue.
I echo the sentiment shared by Mr. Lambrinos that this committee should consider recommending to Parliament that further work be undertaken, and that an extension for such work be sought from the Supreme Court.
Thank you.