Thank you.
My name is Sandra Ka Hon Chu, and I'm the co-director of research and advocacy at the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network.
We're a human rights organization that works to promote the rights of people living with and affected by HIV and AIDS in Canada and internationally. The legal network intervened before the Ontario Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada, in Bedford, and has studied and worked on issues concerning sex work and human rights for over a decade.
I'd like to thank the justice committee for providing my organization with this opportunity to make a submission, which will focus on the impact of criminal law on sex workers' health and human rights, and draw the committee's attention to the growing global consensus that criminalizing sex work, including the purchase of sex, is poor public health practice, as well as a great violation of sex workers' human rights.
In the legal network's written submission, I described in greater detail the health impacts of specific provisions of Bill C-36, which I won't go into now. We also produced a legal brief on Bill C-36, called “Reckless Endangerment”, which was circulated to all members of Parliament, outlining how the law could be applied to sex workers and others. In particular, our analysis of the bill suggests that sex workers would be captured by the criminal law even if the prohibition on communicating is removed.
Based on research in Sweden, Norway, and municipalities in Canada, which already operate on a policy of pursuing clients rather than sex workers, it can be expected that the various provisions of Bill C-36 would do the following. It would undermine a sex worker's ability to screen and identify clients and negotiate the terms of a transaction, including with respect to safer sex; displace sex workers to isolated spaces to avoid police detection where they have little ability to insist on condom use; and displace sex workers from health and social services, particularly in cases of court or police-imposed red zone orders. These often prevent sex workers from certain neighbourhoods where many crucial health and social services exist like food banks, shelters, and health clinics.
It would also erode sex workers' bargaining power, and place pressure on them to see more clients and to provide their services without being able to demand safer sex; prevent venue managers and others from promoting sexual health because condoms may continue to be seized as evidence of illegal activity; and impede sex workers' ability to work indoors and with others, which significantly enhances their ability to control their working conditions, including the ability to negotiate safer sex.
If sex workers are incarcerated as a result of this bill, which could realistically occur, this could disrupt their access to medical treatment and place them at greater risk of contracting HIV and other infections. This would have a particularly severe impact on sex workers who are indigenous and racialized and who already comprise a disproportionate number of people in the prison population in Canada.
Conversely, research conducted internationally has demonstrated that the decriminalization of sex work supports safer working conditions and enhances sex workers' health and safety. I'd like to draw your attention to just a few of the many studies that exist on this issue.
A UN global review of research on sex workers and their clients found that laws that directly or indirectly criminalize sex workers, their clients, and third parties can undermine the effectiveness of HIV and sexual health programs, and limit the ability of sex workers and their clients to seek and benefit from these programs.
A 2010 analysis of data from 21 Asian countries revealed that—