I think the Vancouver experience is very critical in this regard, and while our policing policy is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, what it has done is free up police resources to actually fight exploitation and to not blanket-target the entire industry in sort of throwing mud at the wall to see if they can find any human trafficking victims, as they did before the Olympics.
Before the Olympics, there was a big push to fight human trafficking. They raided 68 health enhancement centres where all the sex workers were Asian. They found zero human trafficking victims and detained and deported hundreds of women. Three people from the Asian sex worker community in Vancouver were murdered the following year. The direct correlation is there.
I think we need to take a step back from this and understand that exploitation does happen, and there has to be a way to work on it without throwing the rights of sex workers under the bus, which is illegal under the charter: You cannot undermine the rights of one group to save another. As well, with youth, they're not “sex workers”. They're “exploited”. I think this label plays into our obligations at UNAIDS, where we're supposed to be removing those kinds of discriminatory laws and the language and all of those things.
For me, again, I think we need to take a step back and, as all of my cohorts are saying, we need to work with sex workers towards a strategy that is going to ensure our health and safety as well as free up all these resources that are currently being used in horrible operations like Operation Northern Spotlight, which is a blanket action and is a waste of resources. If we really want to fight exploitation, we need to put our money where it counts and work on strategies that have been proven to actually have an impact in places.