Justice Committee on July 10th, 2014

[The Chair, Conservative, Mike Wallace]

I call this meeting of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights to order. This is meeting number 41 and we are televised. As per the orders of the day, as per the order of reference of Monday, June 16, 2014, we are dealing with Bill C-36, an act to amend the Criminal Code in response to the Supreme Court of Canada decision in Attorney General of Canada v. Bedford and to make consequential amendments to other acts.

We have a variety of witnesses here again this morning and I appreciate their coming. I will go through and introduce them. Each organization will have 10 minutes to present, and then we'll go to the rounds of questions.

First of all we have, from the Asian Women Coalition Ending Prostitution, Ms. Jay and Ms. Lee. From Hope for the Sold, we have Ms. Brock and Mr. Brock. From the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter, we have Ms. Smith-Tague and Ms. Kerner. From the Aboriginal Legal Services of Toronto, we have Ms. Big Canoe. By video conference from Boston, Massachusetts, from u-r home, we have Ms. Pond.

With that, we will give the floor over to the Asian Women Coalition Ending Prostitution. You have 10 minutes to present. The floor is yours.

[Suzanne Jay, Member, Asian Women Coalition Ending Prostitution]

Thank you and good morning. We appreciate the opportunity to include the perspectives of Asian women into the consideration of Bill C-36. We have also provided a brief.

The Asian Women Coalition Ending Prostitution has the goal of changing societal attitudes towards women, especially women of Asian descent. We work to advance equality for women and to create opportunities for Asian women to have meaningful participation and to take leadership roles in civil society. We see prostitution as a form of male violence against women that prevents women's equality and that encourages racist violence. We also believe that prostitution can be eradicated.

We're a feminist volunteer group. Our members have provided prostitution prevention education in the school system and legal advocacy to women involved in the live-in caregiver program. We've been front-line workers in feminist anti-violence centres. We've provided concrete aid and support to battered women and raped women, including prostituted women.

We were interveners in the Bedford case, where we provided a critical race analysis to help inform the Supreme Court's considerations.

I'll start by saying that we applaud the intent stated in the preamble setting protection of women's dignity and equality as an objective of the bill. This is consistent with the principle that all Canadian law is to be understood and interpreted in the context of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The bill's preamble demonstrates an understanding of the systemic nature of prostitution and the consequence of undermining women's equality on the basis of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, and sex.

We also appreciate that the bill acknowledges the danger that's inherent in prostitution and the profound exploitation done by the pimps, the brothel-keepers, the procurers, the advertisers, and the customers of prostitution to women, especially as it affects Asian and other racialized women. We recommend strengthening this acknowledgement by noting in the preamble the disproportionate impact of prostitution on racialized women.

We support the section of the bill that criminalizes advertising of sexual services because of the role that advertising plays in normalizing and entrenching racist and sexist stereotypes. For example, when we gathered online ads that were posted over a 24-hour period from the adult services section of the Vancouver Craigslist website, we found that 67% of the women advertised in the 1,472 ads we gathered were described or displayed by photo as Asian.

The Asian population of metro Vancouver is only 30%. It's reasonable to assume that Asian women comprise approximately 15% of that population but we're massively disproportionately overrepresented in that advertising. The advertising describes Asian women as providing a girlfriend experience. They're Japanese school girls, really young China dolls, Asian cuties, and they are paired with photos.

The pimps, procurers, brothel-keepers, advertisers, and others who are involved in the sales and marketing of prostituted women cater to these deeply racist demands. It's in their commercial interest to continue to normalize these stereotypes into Canadian society in order to grow the market for their product.

We experience negative consequences when our characteristics, whether they are real or imagined, are sexualized and commodified to promote sexual services. These stereotypes dehumanize and sexualize Asian women and they block our access to our Charter of Rights regardless of whether or not we are prostituted.

From our experience, prostitution overlaps with wife battering, rape, and incest. These are all acts of sexist violence that are usually committed by men in private venues, such as the home, where privacy is used to confine women, reinforce the attacker's authority, and hide the violence from public view. Being indoors does not increase women's safety from male violence in general. However, indoor venues such as Asian massage parlours do enhance safety for men. They shield the pimps, brothel-keepers, procurers, and customers from scrutiny and they hide the violence that's used to control women and the violence that is inherent to prostitution.

We support the tailored legislative approach offered by the bill. It accurately targets the men who are the source of the harm in prostitution.

We also appreciate that the bill differentiates between those who depend on a woman's income without caring about how it's earned. That includes dependent children, hairdressers, and other service providers. These people are very different from the people who are parasitically invested in having a woman enter and stay in prostitution. Those people include pimps posing as bodyguards, pimping boyfriends, brothel-keepers, and prostitution advertisers.

We also think it's important that the bill prevents these men from using a marriage licence or a family or other intimate relationship to escape criminal responsibility for their violence and exploitation.

We call for an amendment to remove the sections that criminalize communication in public areas because it undermines the objective of equality.

We agree that it's harmful for children and adults to observe a blatant act of racist and sexist exploitation, particularly in a situation where one feels they can't effectively intervene. However, it's more harmful for children and adults to observe or know that an exploited person will be punished by the state for their own exploitation. We'd much rather that they were offered the protection of the law and the charter.

Arresting and charging male customers and pimps—and not the women—will effectively address the harms caused by communication in a public place.

I'm now turning the mike over to Alice Lee, who is another member of our group, to talk about human trafficking.

[Alice Lee, Member, Asian Women Coalition Ending Prostitution]

Good morning.

Thank you for the invitation to appear in front of you today to make this presentation.

I was selected to be part of the U.S. State Department's international visitor leadership program to exchange expertise on human trafficking and prostitution with the FBI, state officials, and NGOs.

We praise Bill C-36 because it recognizes that human trafficking and prostitution are closely linked and related. Human trafficking is intrinsic to the Asian woman's experience of prostitution, regardless of what country she comes from.

The interconnected nature of human trafficking and prostitution is logical, given that we adopted the Palermo Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, as well the CEDAW convention. The bill demonstrates leadership nationally and internationally through its commitment to dignity and equality. It is clear to us that Canada rejects the dehumanizing claim that racialized women freely choose prostitution and that somehow we're not harmed by prostitution.

We welcome the political leadership that the bill offers in allowing the police to effectively act on evidence of organized crime in human trafficking and human trafficking into prostitution.

We're especially aware that, currently, the human trafficking law we have only applies to the traffickers, but does not apply to the buyers. The bill makes it illegal for a man to knowingly buy a trafficked woman. The bill also helps prevent the transformation of organized crime into regular members of a legitimate business community.

Those who exploit Asian women for prostitution use various methods to control them. We know pimps will confiscate immigration documents or passports. They are known to encourage and force women to overstay visas, leaving women with illegal immigrant status. They are also known to threaten women who are not regularized with deportation or arrest.

By potentially removing the automatic criminalization of prostituted women, Bill C-36 offers some improvement in response to women in situations of exploitation. However, current immigration contradicts the spirit of the bill to defend women from exploitation. The bill does not change the balance of power created by our current immigration laws. We need this to change in order to enable women to successfully exit prostitution who might not have permanent status, citizenship, or a non-punitive means to be regularized.

The recent cases of abuse and exploitation of employers in Canada under the temporary foreign workers program demonstrates the vulnerability caused by poverty and a lack of secure immigration status. This is also an example of a gross imbalance of power in favour of the employer.

We recommend granting women in exploitative situations landed status upon arrival in Canada regardless of how each woman arrived. This will reduce women's vulnerability to being recruited or trapped in prostitution and will also contribute to her chances of successfully exiting the sex trade.

In conclusion, Bill C-36 establishes a progressive new legal paradigm. However, a made-in-Canada approach to prostitution must be much more robust if we want to create conditions that will allow us to abolish prostitution. Criminal law is limited in that it can only address violence and exploitation after it happens.

The Asian Women Coalition Ending Prostitution calls on our federal government to provide comprehensive social supports. These measures will both serve women who are exiting prostitution, as well as prevent women from being pushed into prostitution in the first place. These are the viable alternatives that we need so that we can counter the systemic inequalities that are in prostitution and be able to access our charter rights.

[The Chair, Conservative, Mike Wallace]

Thank you very much for the presentation from the Asian Women Coalition Ending Prostitution.

Our next presenters are from Hope for the Sold.

The floor is yours.

[Jared Brock, Co-Founder, Hope for the Sold]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Is it 10 minutes?

[The Chair, Conservative, Mike Wallace]

I'll let you know; don't you worry.

[Jared Brock]

All right.

Thank you, honourable members of the committee for having us here today. My name is Jared Brock, and I am a writer and a filmmaker. I must be honest that this is the most dressed up I have been since the last time I attended a wedding, so my wife thanks you.

This is my wife Michelle, and together we run a charity called Hope for the Sold. Our mission is to fight sexual exploitation one word at a time. We do that through writing, speaking, and making movies. We're not lawyers and we're not politicians; we're not professors. We're active citizens who like to ask tonnes of questions.

[Michelle Brock, Co-Founder, Hope for the Sold]

About four years ago, people across Canada started to ask a question that we didn't have an answer for. That question was, should prostitution be legal?

We wanted to focus on sex trafficking and to keep prostitution as a separate issue altogether. But as we continued to meet with and hear the stories of survivors, burnt-out front-line workers, and parents of victims, we started asking what it could look like to go far upstream and put systems into place that would prevent sexual exploitation from happening in the first place.

As we started to look at the issue through the lens of prevention, we realized that we could no longer ignore the legalization conversation and that sex trafficking and prostitution were in many ways connected.

[Jared Brock]

We made a documentary about the issue, which is called Red Light Green Light, and it took us to 10 countries to look at how different countries have dealt with the prostitution issue.

We interviewed numerous victims, the heads of anti-trafficking units, in Stockholm, Amsterdam, and Bern, as well as researchers, after-care workers, etc. There were over 50 interviews in total. Basically what we would like to highlight here today are some of the things we learned on our journey, and to introduce you to some of the people we met.

We met a detective who investigates trafficking incidents in Nevada's legal brothels. He explained that Nevada has a prostitution culture that is fuelled by a booming demand for paid sex. Because of all this demand, pimps have started recruiting teenage girls in malls, luring them to the Strip with promises of cash.

We interviewed an after-care worker who told us that one of her biggest challenges is that grade 12 boys are pimping grade 9 girls out of high school bathroom stalls.

[Michelle Brock]

We met Juliana, who was trafficked from Brazil and forced to work in a sauna, in Switzerland, which has a legal prostitution context. Despite being a legal brothel, the conditions inside the sauna were horrific, and hidden from the eyes of police by a legal facade. When we asked if she had ever been forced to have sex without a condom, she broke; she whimpered and nodded yes. She told us that she is still dealing with many gynecological problems, while her trafficker got off with a fine.

[Jared Brock]

We met a girl in the Netherlands, named Eline. Her husband-trafficker forced her to groom other girls and made her cover for him whenever they dealt with the police. As the head of the anti-trafficking unit in Amsterdam put it, “If I can force you into prostitution, then I can also force you to tell a good story to the police if they come to investigate”.

[Michelle Brock]

In some legal regimes, sex workers have panic buttons in their rooms and train each other how to get away from violent clients. While not every john is violent, it's not unreasonable to say that violence is inherent to prostitution. This is because of three things. It thrives on anonymity, preys on vulnerability, and seeks to fulfill a one-sided fantasy. These three characteristics are present whether prostitution is legal or illegal, indoor or outdoor. While decriminalizing the purchase of sex may have an illusion of empowering women, in reality it leads to a deeper entitlement by men.

We had an opportunity to interview a john who had spent over $300,000 on porn and prostitution. When we asked him what effect legalization would have, he said it would just create more men like him.

We acknowledge that there are some people who, as adults with an education and other options, choose to go into the sex industry. These people might have a little more power and resources to carefully select their clients or negotiate safe sex practices and hire bodyguards. But considering that the industry disproportionately targets the most vulnerable, it would be foolish to think that the majority of those in prostitution would have that kind of relative bargaining power, even within a fully decriminalized context.

In many of the countries we visited, demand for paid sex had caused an illegal sex market to grow alongside the legal sex market, and the most vulnerable continued to be exploited. Since many of the women targeted by Robert Pickton were in the most vulnerable category to begin with, decriminalizing the purchase of sex would not have given them the relative bargaining power to resist him.

While harm reduction efforts are vital and definitely should continue, our government is going to have to pour more and more resources into harm reduction efforts until it seriously looks at the question of why these are needed in the first place.

The question we really need to ask is this. What are the wide-scale, long-term effects of making it easier to pay for sex?

[Jared Brock]

I think what it comes down to is this. So far this debate has been framed as a rights issue, that people have the right to sell their bodies. We don't particularly disagree with that, but I think we need to reframe this as a proportional rights issue.

For example, my right to kill ends with everyone else's right to life. My right to purchase sex ends with everyone else's right not to be exploited. There are many things that are against the law and where harm doesn't actually have to happen, but as a society, we've decided are risky behaviours. A great example of that is drunk driving. Far more often than we'd like, things go wrong and people get hurt. So even though most drunk drivers get home safely, we've decided as a society that it's simply too risky. It's unacceptable because of the risk it poses to other people.

[Michelle Brock]

Accordingly, we think that the intent of Bill C-36 is sound: to decrease demand for paid sex. This being said, we believe that section 286.1, regarding selling of sex around children, is too ambiguous. An amendment or further specification could bring the bill in line with its great preamble, which recognizes that people in prostitution are vulnerable and should not be treated as criminals, regardless of their location.

[Jared Brock]

In our minds, it's not unreasonable that Canada should decriminalize the selling of sex because those involved are overwhelmingly victims of circumstance. We don't criminalize rape victims; we don't criminalize victims of domestic abuse. Prostitution is inherently violent and should be placed in the same category.

For us, the key piece of this legislation is reducing demand for paid sex. If no one pays for sex, no one is trafficked for sex. While obviously there is always going to be someone who is willing to pay for sex, if we can deal with the 80:20, we can prevent the abuse of literally tens of thousands of people in our lifetime. Plato once said that “Excess of liberty...seems only to pass into excess of slavery”. Allowing people to purchase sex will lead to the enslavement of others. This is not the kind of liberty that our nation should seek.

[Michelle Brock]

At various points in the Bedford case, and in the past few days in this committee, there has been a debate over the average age of entering into prostitution. Some argue it's 14; some say 18.

When Mr. Lowman said before this committee that it was a preposterous claim that the average age is 14, I was reminded that one of our interviewees pointed something out. He said that even if you go with a conservative estimate of 18, that means roughly half of them began as minors, and that's considered, by definition, trafficking.

[Jared Brock]

While Mr. Lowman would also like this committee to believe that the vast majority of women in the sex trade are not trafficked, it's likely that he doesn't fully appreciate the nuance of the word “choice”, nor is it likely that he shares the same definition of trafficking that is widely accepted around the globe. Can we really believe that the vast majority of women in the sex trade have, for the complete duration of their commercial sex experience, worked completely free from threat, use of force, coercion, abduction, fraud, deception, the abuse of power, or positions of vulnerability? I frankly find that very difficult to believe.

[Michelle Brock]

One thing that we learned on our filming journey is that laws have normative effects. We interviewed a police investigator in Sweden who was in his twenties when the sex purchase law came into effect. He remembers how it started a national conversation, even with his friends, about whether it was a human right to pay for sex.

[Jared Brock]

I also think it's important that we need to speak to the issue of the Bedford case. Ms. Bedford being a case in point for why we should criminalize the purchase of sex in order to prevent trafficking, as a nation.

While it's rarely mentioned in the media, Ms. Bedford first entered prostitution as a 16-year-old—that's trafficking—to pay for her drug addiction and that of her 37-year-old, drug-dealing boyfriend. Over the course of 14 years, Ms. Bedford engaged in prostitution of all types, indoor and outdoor. By her own admission, she was raped and gang-raped too many times to talk about. Ms. Bedford is a textbook example of the type of vulnerability that traffickers will exploit when there are men who are willing to pay for sex. Many victims come from similar backgrounds, which involve foster care, child molestation, physical abuse, group homes, etc. Today Ms. Bedford is no longer in prostitution, and various reports state that she plans to become a madam if we fully decriminalize...thus profiting from the selling of the sexual services of others.

Let's take a moment to truly understand the situation. We have a former trafficking victim turned potential madam trying to dictate national policy. Ms. Bedford says that she has the right to sell her body. Again, we don't disagree; we just think that everyone else has the right not to be trafficked.

Would full decriminalization have saved Ms. Bedford? Would more demand in the market somehow have kept her safe? How about the thousands of women like her?

[Michelle Brock]

Well, obviously, we can't dive into the intricacies of every facet of this issue in 10 minutes.

We encourage each member of the committee to see Red Light Green Light at some point over the summer. Please feel free to get in touch with us through our charity's website, hopeforthesold.com. We'll send you a free copy and maybe some popcorn too.

[Jared Brock]

Here's the big question that we need to ask as a nation: what are we doing here? Is prostitution really the best that we can offer to our most vulnerable women and children?

Look, if our goal as a nation is to make it easier to pay for sex, then let's toss Bill C-36 out the window right now. But if our goal is to create a more gender-equal country, to forge a nation that supports proportional rights, a nation that actually prevents sex trafficking, then let's seriously consider Bill C-36 as a great first step in the right direction.

The Supreme Court's core demand was to safeguard the personal safety of prostituted individuals. Let's take it a step further and safeguard the personal safety of every single person in Canada, for generations to come.

Personally, Michelle and I want to raise our future girls in a society where they're not at risk of being trafficked, and we'd like to raise our future boys in a society where they don't think they have the right to purchase other people's bodies.

Thank you for your time. I am 39 seconds over.

[The Chair, Conservative, Mike Wallace]

You're right.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Conservative, Mike Wallace]

Thank you very much for that presentation from Hope for the Sold.

Our next presenters are from the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter.

The floor is yours.

[Keira Smith-Tague, Front-Line Anti-Violence Worker, Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter]

Hi. I'll start, and then I'll be followed by my co-worker Hilla.

Good morning. My name is Keira Smith-Tague, and I'm a front-line anti-violence worker at Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter. Vancouver Rape Relief is Canada's oldest rape crisis centre. Since opening in 1973, our centre has responded to over 40,000 women calling our 24-hour crisis line and seeking our support to escape all forms of male violence against women, including prostitution. Our transition house provides safe shelter to over 120 women and their children escaping violent men each year.

Rape Relief is a collective of women of varying age and class, many of them women of colour and aboriginal women. Our collective, both historically and currently, includes women who have exited the sex industry. Our authority and knowledge on prostitution as violence against women is grounded in and advanced by our front-line work with women currently or formerly prostituted. We view prostitution as a form of male violence against women within a spectrum of men's violence, alongside rape, incest, wife assault, and sexual harassment. As such, we are deeply invested in amendments to the federal government's Bill C-36.

We know from members of our group and from women who access our services that the sex industry is both an expression and reinforcement of women's inequality in society. As such, many of the stated purposes of Bill C-36 in the preamble are consistent with our analyses. We are encouraged by and in support of this intent. We are in agreement with the acknowledgement of the disproportionate impact on women and children of prostitution, as it is consistent with our front-line knowledge of the sexist and gendered nature of this industry. It has already been said a few times, but I do want to repeat it. Almost all of the buyers in prostitution are men, and almost all of those sold are women and children. This fact alone shows the stark power imbalance between men and women in this industry.

The argument that's been made throughout these hearings, that normalizing this practice by fully decriminalizing or legalizing it will enhance women's inequality, is absurd. Women are already born into a world with a disadvantage to men. We live in a society where men have more power than women socially, economically, and politically. Overwhelmingly, men use that power against us, often along with their physical force or threat of it. We see this perfectly reflected in their entitlement to buy us.

Before I even talk about the violence and exploitation that is an alarming reality in prostitution, I wanted to make clear the very foundation of this industry as a sexist and misogynist one, and on that basis alone should not be condoned or legalized. In both the Bedford case and this process, men's demands to sex are being argued as their rights, and are being promoted and advocated for over the rights of women to equality in Canada. It's women's lives that are at stake, not johns' and pimps', and we expect responsibility from all political parties to ensure that you're invested in promoting women's equality first and foremost.

I want to talk a bit more about consent, as it has come up over the past few days. The notion that the relationship between prostituted women and the men who buy them is a transaction between two willing, consenting adults cannot be applied to prostitution. In the Criminal Code of Canada, it explicitly states that consent cannot be obtained if there are “threats or fear of the application of force to the complainant or to a person other than the complainant” or “the accused induces the complainant to engage in the activity by abusing a position of trust, power or authority”.

Consent cannot be bought. The very act of exchanging money or materials in return for sexual services reflects the coercion necessary by men in order to buy women.

We know from women who call our lines and live in our house that the source of the harm in prostitution is from the men who buy them and sell them, so of course we're completely in favour of those men being held accountable and criminalized for their behaviour. We are encouraged that the government has acknowledged the profit and power of advertisers of the sex industry, and are in support of the inclusion of them under those to be criminalized for their exploitative behaviour as well.

We know that the growth of trafficking is fuelled by the local demand by men, which increases the trafficking of women and girls both domestically and internationally. Therefore, we agree that it is necessary to denounce and prohibit the purchase of sexual services because it creates a demand for prostitution. Direct criminalization of purchasing sexual services in any location is positive, sends a clear message to men that buying women is not acceptable in Canada, and is consistent with the government's intent to reduce the demand. We find it appropriate to situate the new law under crimes against the person in the Criminal Code alongside other forms of violence and trafficking.

We commend the federal government's intent to encourage those who engage in prostitution to report incidents of violence and to leave prostitution. As we know, issues such as poverty, racism, childhood sexual abuse, and addiction overwhelmingly affect women in prostitution, both before entering and continuing afterwards. We also know that most women who enter prostitution enter as children and teenagers.

There are provisions in this bill that we find extremely concerning and think are inconsistent with what the government's stated intent was to achieve in the preamble. The provision that would criminalize women communicating in public places for the purposes of prostitution where persons under the age of 18 can reasonably be expected to be present is inconsistent with the understanding that prostitution is a practice that overwhelmingly targets, exploits, and coerces vulnerable women, and therefore their continued criminalization is in contradiction to the objective to protect them.

We are disappointed that this particular provision will target and punish the most marginalized, those women forced to prostitute in public space who are overwhelmingly aboriginal women and largely impoverished, and we believe it is a dangerous step back in protecting them from men's violence. If the intent of the law is to protect exploited persons, then the location in which they are exploited should not determine whether they face criminal sanctions.

Rape Relief has argued that government funding be provided to alleviate women's impoverishment and help support women to leave prostitution. So we are encouraged that some federal money is included as an initiative alongside Bill C-36. However, we do not think $20 million is significant enough in reality to provide women with alternatives to prostitution. In order for women to have economic options other than prostitution, there must be funding and attention to the current conditions of women's lives in Canada. Women don't have enough money to live on in B.C. and across the country. We see this first-hand with our residents and their children and the numerous women calling us for shelter each day and night.

Women need a guaranteed livable income, adequate and affordable safe housing options, affordable child care, and more women-only detox beds in treatment centres, to be established in addition to the funding already allocated to exiting services. On top of these changes, we recommend that funding be allocated to existing women's groups already providing front-line services and should not be diverted to policing.

If passed, Bill C-36 has the potential to set a precedent in Canada that the buying and selling of women and girls by men will not be tolerated and for this we are hopeful the government will listen and follow the lead of women's groups and survivors. Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter stands firm in calling for legislation to criminalize pimps, johns, and profiteers for their violence against women, but we absolutely cannot endorse any criminalization of women in this bill, and for this we call on the justice committee to remove this provision. As long as men view women as commodities that can be bought or sold and women face being penalized for their own exploitation, women will not have full access to participate as equal members of society.