It's hard to briefly summarize, but I'll do my best.
Most definitely, sex workers, like most people, were impacted by COVID. If you consider that people were already living quite a marginalized and surveilled existence, that was heightened in the context of COVID. What that meant for a lot of sex workers, because massage parlours were shut down and strip clubs were shut down, was that a lot of them were out of work. Some—not all, and definitely not most—were able to move into online work. That kind of work is not accessible to a lot of sex workers, because you have to have regular connections or access to technology.
Most sex workers were not able to access the financial aid, the CERB. Our alliance spent a lot of time advocating for wages—we contacted Maryam Monsef in particular—to provide financial supports for sex workers, most of whom are living in poverty. That was a really difficult thing to do. A lot of sex worker groups—Maggie's was fantastic at this, and Jenny can speak to it—did excellent mutual aid efforts because, at the end of the day, the government was not very helpful to sex workers living in a COVID context. That financial aid was not available to anybody making their money from criminalized means.
This committee really needs to think beyond this notion of arrest and the harms of PCEPA as arrest, because it goes beyond that. If you think about criminalization as really impacting people's ability to access more mainstream supports or financial supports from the government.... It's a really important thing that you all need to consider, the lack of access that sex workers have to financial supports, as well as medical, legal and social supports because of criminalization.
That's a tiny picture of that, if it helps a bit.