Pardon me, I'm very allergic to fluorescent lights. I was told the lighting in here would be halogen, which is not true. So I will do my best here.
With this bill, you are going to drive us so far underground and make us work under such difficult conditions, with many more people working within those more dangerous conditions, that violence is bound to escalate. There is no question. It is not theory; it is not hypothesis. We are going to start getting killed; there is no question about that.
That was from Cathy, a witness at a parliamentary committee on Bill C-49, also known as the communicating law, on October 22, 1985. I was also one of the witnesses that day. We told you then what would happen, and you said, “Thank you very much”, and went ahead and passed the bill.
On December 20, 2013, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down one-third of the communicating law and one-tenth of the procuring law and the bawdy house law. It did so on the basis that the old laws compromised not only our health and safety, but were found on evidence to cause catastrophic harm. So why would this government not only reintroduce the old laws, but go even further and write new sections that will make our occupation even more dangerous than the old regime made it?
Bill C-36 is not rationally connected to the Supreme Court's reasoning in Canada v. Bedford. The laws regulating the sex trade are important, not only in an obvious way for what they prohibit but also for the conditions they create and their influence on how sex workers are perceived. When it is any other group, other than sex workers, people intuitively understand that there is a direct connection between what the law says about a group of people and how individuals of that group are treated by others.
When Russia passed laws to squelch the gay rights movement in June, 2013, no one was surprised to hear of a rise in gay-bashing cases, or that those protesting the laws—not the bashers—were jailed. When Uganda passed a law that included life imprisonment for homosexual acts and Nigeria banned same-sex unions and began arresting those suspected of being gay, we were not shocked to hear of beatings, torture, and murders.
We know that criminalizing homosexuality leads to increased violence against homosexuals. It should be equally obvious that criminalizing sex work increases violence against sex workers. That is one of the reasons why decriminalization is so important to us. Laws don't only reflect society, they shape both attitudes and how activities are conducted. Social purity laws are particularly problematic. Think about the prohibition of alcohol in the U.S. in the 1920s. People didn't react by saying, “Okay, I guess I'll never have another glass of wine”. Instead, they found ways around the law. Prohibition enriched organized crime, kept the police busy, added risks that weren't there before, and criminalized the actions of a significant percentage of the population. The laws shaped the way the activity was carried out. What it didn't do was achieve its stated aims. Of course, this will be the effect of Bill C-36.
Our clients have been called horrible names lately: perverts, pathetic, predators. But think who our clients really are. They are not the Robert Picktons or the Gary Ridgways of this world. They do not arrive on a shuttle from Mars at sundown. They are men who, for many different reasons, buy our services, and I must stress, “our services”. They do not buy us. Our clients are your fathers, your brothers, your uncles, and yes, your colleagues.
The spectre of parading them in front of the media and courts for the entertainment value of shame and humiliation is irresistible to those of the finger-pointing persuasion. But these are revenge laws, and revenge laws have no place in a just society.
When you tell society that we are criminals, that you want to legislate us out of existence, predators will take you up on the offer. We all know about the Robert Picktons and the Gary Ridgways of this world. Gary Ridgway, the Green River murderer, said:
...I hate most prostitutes and I did not want to pay them for sex. I also picked prostitutes as [my] victims because they were easy to pick up without being noticed. I knew they would not be reported missing right away and might never be reported missing.
Ridgway was convicted of murdering 49 of my colleagues, but later confessed to murdering almost double that number. Bad laws serve us up on a silver platter to sexual predators.
Most people, whether pro or con, aren't happy with Bill C-36. SPOC's advice is to scrap the bill in its entirety. After all, as Justice Minister Peter MacKay said in his statement released on December 20, 2013:
A number of other Criminal Code provisions remain in place to protect those engaged in prostitution and other vulnerable persons, and to address the negative effects prostitution has on communities.
On that, and on that alone, we agree with Minister MacKay. There are a plethora of other Criminal Code provisions that specifically address extortion, coercion, procuring, assault, forcible confinement, human trafficking, and about 14 different laws protecting against the exploitation of minors.
SPOC's position is to let the laws that the Supreme Court struck down—