Good afternoon, and thank you for inviting me to present to the committee. My name is Christa Big Canoe, and I'm the legal advocacy director of Aboriginal Legal Services. It is our position that the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act is an end-demand legislation that is not effective, that it is not creating positive change, and that it increases harms and opportunities for violence against sex workers.
Given my limited time, I'm going to point to the Pivot Legal Society's “Evaluating Canada's Sex Work Laws: The Case for Repeal” as a good document that this committee is encouraged to read, review and seriously contemplate.
Stigma perpetrates conditions that have allowed predators to murder, rape and abuse sex workers with impunity. Police fail to investigate and prosecute these crimes when they involve indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA+ community members. They are assumed to be sex workers. The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls heard this horrific narrative time and time again. Negative stereotypes about sex workers continue to have adverse impacts on the way indigenous women are portrayed, seen and treated. An example of this was apparent in R. v. Barton, in which Cindy Gladue was reduced to being referred to multiple times in court as a native prostitute, native girl and sex worker.
Disappeared and murdered indigenous women are often assumed to be sex workers or reported in the media as being sex workers. This belief, although erroneous on many occasions, results in less attention being paid when indigenous women go missing.
Laws prohibiting the exchange of sex for compensation between consenting adults are not the way to end violence against indigenous women or to address inequality and systemic poverty. The pervasiveness of these stereotypes and racism is so ingrained that the Supreme Court in Barton in 2019 had to instruct that:
[O]ur criminal justice system and all participants within it should take reasonable steps to address systemic biases, prejudices, and stereotypes against Indigenous persons—and in particular Indigenous women and sex workers—head on. Turning a blind eye to these biases, prejudices, and stereotypes is not an answer. Accordingly, as an additional safeguard going forward, in sexual assault cases where the complainant is an Indigenous woman or girl, trial judges would be well advised to provide an express instruction aimed at countering prejudice against Indigenous women and girls.
Sexual exploitation of indigenous women and girls and two-spirited community members occurs well before they decide to engage in sex work. Indigenous children who are apprehended into child protection services at alarming rates in this country often experience sexual exploitation. Addressing issues of poverty and inequity and decolonizing approaches to child welfare institutions is the leading way to reduce sexual exploitation that indigenous children in this country experience.
The acute mass incarceration of indigenous women in Canada's correctional institutes also demonstrates the high criminalization of indigenous women. Indigenous women now account for 42% of the women inmate population in Canada. Laws that further perpetuate stereotypes and distinguish groups such as sex workers are harmful, and overcriminalized populations are the ones that face the most scrutiny from authorities, even when it's not warranted.
The ban on purchasing sex directly impacts sex workers' safety and indigenous sex workers' safety, engaging the rights of liberty, life, and security of the person under section 7 of the charter, as well as section 15, the guarantee of equality under the law.
The court in Barton also reminded us of an important thing:
Our criminal justice system holds out a promise to all Canadians: everyone is equally entitled to the law's full protection and to be treated with dignity, humanity, and respect. Ms. Gladue was no exception. She was a mother, a daughter, a friend, and a member of her community. Her life mattered. She was valued. She was important. She was loved. Her status as an Indigenous woman who performed sex work did not change any of that in the slightest. But as these reasons show, the criminal justice system did not deliver on its promise to afford her the law's full protection, and as a result, it let her down—indeed, it let us all down.
We call for the repeal of PCEPA . It's unconstitutional and actively prevents people who sell or trade sexual services from enjoying their fundamental charter rights.
Like Pivot, Aboriginal Legal Services was an intervenor in the Bedford case before the Supreme Court of Canada. We intervened mainly because of the life and liberty risks that the Criminal Code provisions were creating for indigenous sex workers.
In July 2014 we also made submissions to this committee on Bill C-36. At the time, we objected to the passing of Bill C-36 because of the acute indigenous overrepresentation in the criminal justice and penal systems. This situation has only gotten worse in respect of those two issues.
The overall impact of the bill—