Justice Committee on March 4th, 2022

[The Chair, Liberal, Randeep Sarai]

I call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number six of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights.

Pursuant to a motion adopted on Tuesday, February 8, the committee is meeting to review the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act.

Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format pursuant to the House order of November 25, 2021. Members are attending in person in the room, and remotely using the Zoom application. The proceedings will be made available via the House of Commons website. With regard to a speaking list, the committee clerk and I will do our best to maintain a consolidated order of speaking for all members, whether they are participating virtually or in person.

Before I welcome the witnesses, I'll just let you know that I use a little cue card, and when you have 30 seconds left, I'll raise it. When you're out of time, I'll raise this. Out of respect for time, I ask everyone to comply with those. It's the only way all our members will get to ask their questions. If you miss something, you can usually add it in the question and answer segment of the meeting.

I'd now like to welcome the witnesses. There are some witnesses with whom we're still trying to connect. Our clerk will attempt to do that.

You can speak for five minutes as a witness for your group, and then the next witness will speak. Subsequently, there will be rounds of questions and answers.

The first witness is Jenn Clamen from the Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform.

You have for five minutes.

[Jenn Clamen, National Coordinator, Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform]

Thank you.

Our alliance is made up of 25 sex worker rights groups across the country, led predominantly by sex workers living the impacts of PCEPA and who serve thousands of sex workers through front-line services and advocacy.

I'll use my time today to dispel some of the myths, misinformation and unfounded statements that the committee has heard over the past three weeks. My intention in doing that is to redirect your attention to rigorous empirical research that you need to complete your task of studying the impacts of PCEPA.

One such myth is this erroneous division between exploited survivors on the one hand and independent sex workers or entrepreneurs on the other. All witnesses, including sex workers, are presenting evidence about people who sell or trade sex in difficult circumstances, most with limited options, yet a false divide is being created, as if people's experiences fall within one of two categories: people who have agency and don't experience abuses and those who do experience abuses and don't have agency.

Many sex workers do experience exploitation and violence. Sex workers across the country, if not the world, recognize that this is due in part to the impacts of criminalization. Recognizing the harmful impacts of criminalization doesn't mean you're abandoning one group over the other. Rather, it means you're recognizing how criminalization functions and particularly how it negatively impacts the most marginalized sex workers living and working in the most difficult conditions. Criminalization is a tool that encourages social and racial profiling. It is an absolute deterrent to anyone reporting violence, abuse or exploitation.

Supporters of PCEPA claim that the average age of entry is 12 to 14 years old. This is a discredited claim. Young people do experience abuses, both in and out of the sex industry, but massage parlours, strip clubs and agencies are not rife with 12- and 13-year-olds. This is not the average age that people start to sell or trade sex.

Misinformation about the average age of entry is what researcher John Lowman calls a “cornerstone of prohibitionist rhetoric”. He says that “treating prostitutes as children makes it much easier for prohibitionists to argue that [women] should be saved from [ourselves].”

Discredited claims about the age of entry are circulated by people who support criminalization and PCEPA. The most recent empirical research paints a very different picture. A 2018 study by Cecilia Benoit indicates 24 years of age as the average age of entry. A 2011 study by van der Meulen found it to be 20. A 2007 study by O'Doherty found it to be 23 years of age.

Supporters of PCEPA claim that it addresses violence against sex workers. None of the PCEPA offences, including the client and third party offences, require any element of exploitation or coercion. Empirical evidence confirms that criminalizing any aspect of sex work forces people currently working in the industry to forgo security measures and endure poor working conditions to avoid detection. PCEPA fosters exploitation and violence.

Proponents of PCEPA claim that it's an equality model. A legal regime that relies on the surveillance, profiling, detention and arrest of marginalized and racialized communities cannot claim to be an equality or a feminist model. A legal regime that criminalizes and seeks to eradicate an income-generating activity predominantly exercised by marginalized women cannot claim to be an equality or feminist model. Equality means that everybody receives the benefit of human rights protections. Substantive equality means that there's a recognition that criminal law, and PCEPA in particular, disproportionately targets racialized, Black, Asian and indigenous communities. PCEPA encourages the uninvited presence of law enforcement into the lives of these sex workers and has grave consequences.

The last myth that you've heard—but you've heard more than this—is that the law is not harming sex workers, but it's that sex workers are misunderstanding the law. Sex workers know that PCEPA is designed to criminalize their work and eradicate them and their means of survival. The criminalization of sex work produces real risks and impacts on how sex workers organize their lives.

The harms of criminalization go beyond arrest. They create barriers to accessing health, social, legal or police services. They foster isolation and limit who sex workers can reach out to for support. They create a risk of eviction and of child apprehension. The dangers of PCEPA and police that sex workers speak of are most definitely real. They are not a figment of sex workers' imaginations and definitely not an instruction from an imaginary pimp.

Empirical evidence matters. This review needs to prioritize empirical evidence and the experiences of people working under PCEPA. The preamble is based on complete fiction that sex work is inherently exploitative. It reproduces stigma that increases targeted violence against sex workers.

Verify the unfounded claims made to you these past couple of weeks around age of entry, the number of women who have agency or the alleged failure of the New Zealand model. There are no methodologically sound sources for these claims.

At what point do sex workers, people currently working in the industry, get to be experts of their own lives?

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Randeep Sarai]

Thank you, Ms. Clamen.

Up next is Jenny Duffy, the board chair for Maggie's Toronto Sex Workers Action Project, for five minutes.

[Jenny Duffy, Board Chair, Maggie's Toronto Sex Workers Action Project]

Thank you.

Maggie's Toronto Sex Workers Action Project is one of Canada's oldest funded sex worker justice organizations. For over 35 years, we've supported sex workers in Toronto through drop-in programming, harm reduction services, legal supports, food security efforts and more. Our work is in direct response to the harm caused by legislation like Bill C‑36.

The majority of sex workers we serve are from poor, working-class, racialized and indigenous communities, are members of the LGBTQ2S community and work as street-based sex workers. We've launched culturally specific services including the nation's first indigenous-led program for sex workers and emergency supports for Black sex workers who face compounded forms of violence as a result of criminalization.

Bill C‑36 claims to protect sex workers but in practice it isolates us from supports and facilitates violence. It recreates the impacts of the former unconstitutional laws for sex workers.

In 2017, one of our long-time community members, Alloura Wells, went missing. She was a 27-year-old Black and indigenous transwoman who attended our drop-in programming and navigated poverty, homelessness and police violence in the city. Following her disappearance, Alloura's father contacted Toronto Police Service to report her missing. He was told the case wasn't a high priority. Instead, police told her father that people like Alloura are transient, that they disappear and reappear all the time.

We formed our own search parties led by long-time activist Monica Forrester. Because of our public efforts demanding justice for Alloura Wells, five months after her initial disappearance, Toronto Police caved to the pressure and finally issued a missing persons report.

A short while later, a community member named Rebecca contacted Maggie's with news that she'd discovered a body in the Rosedale Valley and had actually contacted police months before. Police did not issue a news release when the body was reported and did not release details to the public, as they normally would. Rebecca followed up multiple times with Toronto Police to learn about developments, even reaching out to The 519 Church Street community centre, which promised to have staff investigate. The 519 did not follow up with Rebecca or our community.

After seeing media coverage about our search parties for Alloura, Rebecca reached out to us at Maggie's. Despite Alloura's father attempting to issue a missing persons report much earlier on, heavy news coverage of Alloura's disappearance and a community member notifying local service organizations, we had not been informed about this key development.

Only after following up with police about Rebecca's discovery did they agree to re-test DNA, and on November 23 they identified Alloura's body. They maintain that the cause of death can't be determined, but estimated that she died some time in July.

Toronto Police dismissed Alloura's disappearance because of her background in sex work, her race, gender identity and struggles with homelessness.

When laws like Bill C‑36 mark our communities as social problems to be eradicated, and instruct police to criminalize sex workers, our ability to access basic support and safety is undermined.

Indigenous women, Black and racialized women, transgender women, migrant women and people living through poverty are overrepresented in street-based sex work. The combination of the offences against communication and purchasing and the presence of police pushes street-based sex workers and their clients into remote areas. Working in poorly lit back alleys far from their homes, social services and their peers, the street-based sex workers we serve at Maggie's report increased difficulty screening their clients, detecting violent situations and negotiating consent.

Street-based sex workers at Maggie's have consistently disclosed about harassment from law enforcement and being forced to relocate around the city to avoid police. During our COVID-19 emergency support fund, one of the many indigenous sex workers who reached out for financial aid was a young Anishinabe street-based worker experiencing harassment and aggression from the police while struggling to work and survive at the height of the pandemic.

Bill C‑36 facilitates this violence and excludes us from solutions to improve our working conditions. One of the most devastating consequences of this law is that our communities are made responsible for the violence enacted on us. It's in this context that sex worker justice organizations like ours have been essential spaces to organize, support one another and continue fighting for decriminalization like the life and death issue that it is.

[The Chair, Liberal, Randeep Sarai]

Thank you, Ms. Duffy. You still had 20 more seconds, but appreciate the promptness.

Next we'll have Peers Victoria Resources Society. I don't know if it will be Sophia Ciavarella or Sarah Smith, but either one of you has the floor for five minutes.

[Sophia Ciavarella, Operations Manager, Peers Victoria Resources Society]

Hello.

Peers Victoria Resources Society is a local grassroots organization for sex workers in greater Victoria. Since 1995 we have offered outreach, drop-in, housing, health, violence prevention, small business training, peer support worker training services and more. We serve about 650 unique individuals a year.

We believe strongly in the experiential voice—that our community knows best how to take care of ourselves. As such, two-thirds of our staff have current or former experience in sex work.

We come to you from the traditional territories of the Lekwungen-speaking peoples now known as the Songhees and Esquimalt nations.

The PCEPA severely undermines health and justice for sex workers. Because of the criminalization of the stopping of traffic for the purpose of selling sexual services and the criminalization of the purchase of sexual services, sex workers are forced into rushed and clandestine negotiations with clients, with a reduced ability to screen clients or assert their boundaries. Further, street-based sex workers are forced to work in isolated areas further away from public spaces.

Much research has shown that criminalization of any group in society, including sex workers, increases social isolation, poor health outcomes and reduces access to public supports.

Escort agencies offer much-needed work-setting options for sex workers, particularly those newer to the work, because they offer safer group spaces and peer mentorship. However, these spaces are prohibited by sections 236.2, 236.3 and 236.4. In our community these businesses are all women-run, long-term establishments that offer a desirable work setting for many of the sex workers served by our organization.

[The Chair, Liberal, Randeep Sarai]

Ms. Ciavarella, could you slow down? The interpreters are having a hard time staying at pace with you.

Thank you.

[Sophia Ciavarella]

I apologize.

[The Chair, Liberal, Randeep Sarai]

No worries.

[Sophia Ciavarella]

With sex work legally defined as inherently exploitive, violence against sex workers' bodies is naturalized. When the only way of helping sex workers is to rescue them, those who are actively engaged in sex work are seen as disposable. Their voices are deprioritized, and they face barriers to justice.

In the past four years not a single reported case of violence that my organization has supported sex workers through has led to an arrest or formal charges despite a rare collaborative working relationship between Peers and the Victoria Police Department.

From a cohort of cisgender and transgender sex workers in Vancouver, 72.2% of participants reported no perceived change in working conditions following the passage of PCEPA, and 26.4% reported negative changes. They also reported less access to health and community services under the new legislation. In the same cohort, 38.2% of participants experienced violence following PCEPA-reported violence to police, which did not differ significantly from pre-PCEPA reporting.

Immigrant and racialized sex workers were more likely to report negative changes and less likely to report violence to the police.

We think it is time to truly prioritize the well-being of people in the sex industry. We need to remove the Criminal Code as a barrier to well-designed public supports. These supports need to focus on universal basic income, gender-based violence prevention, housing and peer-based initiatives that reduce stigma.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Randeep Sarai]

Thank you, Ms. Ciavarella.

Are you sharing your time with Ms. Smith? Yes.

You have two and a half minutes, Ms. Smith.

[Sarah Smith, Small Business and Indoor Workers Group Coordinator, Peers Victoria Resources Society]

Thank you so much for having me.

Each of the following paragraphs are comments garnered from the sex worker community of Peers Victoria Resources Society when asked how the law and stigma impact one's life. These are all quotes.

“One view is you feel unsafe in your outside environment, living with daily effects of stigma.”

“Your entirety as a human being is discarded by what you do to pay your bills.”

“I am a good person. My house is clean, I am clean. I give love and I care. For a living. How bad could I be?”

“It keeps me stuck in my situation and unable to move into different things even if I'm making every effort to do so.”

“I can get an education and still be haunted by the stigma of having been a sex worker.”

“My life would be a transformed experience of great significance, under decriminalization.”

“Current Legislation isolates the marginalized, vulnerable communities, women, indigenous people, indigenous women, LGBTQ community members, who are human too, the law is perpetuating violence on the basic human rights of those people.”

“It builds hatred, separation, isolation, addiction, hopelessness and mental health issues.”

“Sex work stigma has distanced me from my family.”

“If our society respected us and our work and as human beings too, that would set a different tone. To families and among one another. On the micro level.”

“It is impossible to find housing without lying on rental applications. Landlords will not rent to sex workers—if I do manage to secure housing by lying, I am constantly at risk of homelessness if my landlord finds out.”

“Being an 'out' sex worker has lasting consequences, like being unable to secure another job due to involvement in the sex trade.”

“Stigma has made it difficult for me to access a legal representative to incorporate my business—every lawyer I have reached out to won't touch me with a ten-foot pole. It's so frustrating knowing that I am operating legally but am unable to hire legal counsel, a driver, security, etc., because they're criminalized under the current law. I'm trying to play by the rules of running my business but am always tiptoeing around my bank, landlord, etc.”

“Impacts caused by laws: risk of being banned by other countries when travelling abroad for simply being a SW, even with no proof of any plans to work in another country.”

“No housing protections, if a landlord discovers what I do, I can be evicted with only suspicion.”

“The assumption is that sex workers would choose this work intentionally, not just as a last resort, ignoring the many voices of the people who do what they do.”

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Randeep Sarai]

Thank you so much for staying within the time.

Next is the first round of questions. It will be for six minutes, starting with Mr. Moore.

[Rob Moore, Conservative, Fundy Royal, NB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all of our witnesses today as we finish up a very important study.

We know that this legislation came about after the Bedford decision. It's an attempt to strike the right balance, but there are always improvements that can be made.

I note that just in the last few days we've seen the Court of Appeal for Ontario uphold several provisions of PCEPA, or Bill C-36. That brings us to this study. We're studying ways we can improve the law and how the laws work. We've certainly heard from a wide variety of witnesses, some who are very supportive of PCEPA.

I have a question for the Peers Victoria Resources Society. There are two witnesses here. I guess you can decide between yourselves who would like to answer.

It was mentioned that you provide harm reduction support services, education and employment training for current and former sex workers. Could either of you elaborate on what those support services look like, education and employment training as well? Perhaps share with the committee what that looks like typically, the services you are providing for your region.

[Sarah Smith]

I'll speak to that.

I run the small business training program at Peers Victoria Resources Society. We're not an exit organization. We look to support current and former sex workers where they are, knowing full well that some other employment opportunities don't offer the best perks or rates of pay.

With that in mind, we look to support people where they are, whether they're continuing in a sex trade or they want to branch out. With the small business training program, we go through everything to run a small business, whether someone has a small business they already have established and are looking to continue it, whether they're starting a small business, or whether they're starting or continuing their own small business that is sex work.

In that curriculum, we cover everything from vision statements, mission statements, partnership agreements, staffing agreements, municipal bylaws....

Gosh, there's so much. I'm at a loss right now.

[Rob Moore, Conservative, Fundy Royal, NB]

That covers a lot of it.

[Sarah Smith]

Yes, it's a lot. I also ran the drop-in centre for about seven years. I just gave up the position late last year.

The drop-in centre is where everybody comes in to get a healthy meal and a sense of community. You really can't discount the sense of community, because when you're stigmatized the way that sex workers are in our society, you feel awful out in the real world and you don't feel that you have a community or a family or people that you can be yourself around.

At the drop-in centre we have harm-reduction supplies, such as clean needles and condoms and such, and a healthy meal. We do advocacy and have a jumping-off point for all of our other programming. We do housing support and health support. We have a nurse who comes in. We do art classes, which everybody loves, loves, loves [Technical difficulty—Editor].

[Rob Moore, Conservative, Fundy Royal, NB]

I couldn't hear the last few things you said. I don't know if you can hear me. Do you want to finish that last thought?

[The Chair, Liberal, Randeep Sarai]

Ms. Smith, you're on mute right now, but if you could, would you just repeat the last 10 seconds of what you were trying to say?

[Sarah Smith]

Was there a question? Something went off in my Internet connection.

[Rob Moore, Conservative, Fundy Royal, NB]

You were just finishing a thought, but it cut out with about 10 seconds left.

[Sarah Smith]

Okay. About the drop-in program?

[Rob Moore, Conservative, Fundy Royal, NB]

Yes.

[Sarah Smith]

We do housing and health support. We have a donation room where everyone can access kind of new clothes. I mentioned harm reduction supplies and art classes. We have workshops that connect people with other social service agencies in the city that can be supports and advocates for them, as well as help with taxes. We do a lot.

[Rob Moore, Conservative, Fundy Royal, NB]

Thank you.

How much time do I have left, Mr. Chair?