Certainly.
To answer the first part of your question, I think you can look at any law and pick and choose which ones may be the most neutral or most valuable. I think, from a fundamental theoretical position, when you say that you want to repeal the whole thing, it's because the process or framework itself is failing to recognize some of the issues.
I go back to Bedford. The issue is that people actually die while doing sex work as a result of being pushed into unsafe circumstances. Quite frankly, some of what this act is doing is recreating the same types of circumstances and situations that put those people into harm. They've pushed them back because of the fear of police or authorities potentially charging who they're selling sex to. What that looks like is that you're seeing some of those same pre-Bedford conditions, whereby people don't have the ability to put safety checks into place.
When I say the position we take as Aboriginal Legal Services is repeal, it's because it needs to be recast. When I say “recast”, I'm talking about legislation that already exists.
One thing that my colleague was just talking about was all of this evidence and information we have since PCEPA came in. What about all the information we had pre-PCEPA about what was and wasn't being done with the human trafficking provisions within the Criminal Code?
There was this big conversation last time I was before the committee about how difficult it was to enforce it. I'm still trying to understand what provisions within this legislative framework changed or increased the ability of authorities to prosecute or do what they should have been doing, quite frankly.
Now that we've put a spotlight on it and now that we have a law, maybe that's where there's increased reporting or uptake. Within our own tool kit of laws, we actually had the ability to prosecute and go after human traffickers. We didn't do it well, so how do we address that issue?