Certainly. The harms I see directly from this law are quite clear, not just to a person who's exercising sex work but potentially to the people they're enlisting. There should be exceptions, even within PCEPA, so that people are not charged because they're acting in a supporting capacity. There's not enough clarity on some of those parts of the law.
As an example, if I'm a sex worker and I'm hiring a bodyguard, there is the potential for them to still be charged, investigated and harassed by police. Once they're being investigated and harassed by police, it creates a context where that place is not safe.
The other thing is that the majority of sex work is now done indoors. We have the Internet, and we rely on communication through the Internet. When people are afraid that they're going to be charged or that police will be involved and they will have their own livelihoods harmed, they don't want to consent to go to places that a sex worker has determined is safe for them to deliver that service, so they're pushed—again because the market demands it—into “dark corners”. They're pushed into places where they know that enforcement's not going to happen.
Using the Vancouver example—and we heard a bit from your last panel about that—the Vancouver police, in talking with Downtown Eastside sex workers, made a particular decision not to prosecute them, because they recognized that it pushed them into corners; it pushed them into dark industrial sections, and then that would be like going back to pre-Bedford; that would be like going back to—I'm not just being smart here—the pig farm. That would be like letting indigenous women disappear again.