Justice Committee on April 1st, 2022

[Rhéal Fortin, Bloc, Rivière-du-Nord, QC]

It would be important for witnesses to understand that written documents are not to be used if they are not produced in both official languages. There are people in Quebec who are listening to the testimony and who cannot read or understand English. So it's essential to have documents in both official languages for parliamentary activities. I just wanted to remind the witnesses, with all due respect.

Exceptionally, I will not object to our guest testifying by referring to her document. I understand that we will have it in French on Monday or Tuesday.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Randeep Sarai]

Thank you, Mr. Fortin.

To the witness, please make a copy of that afterwards and send it to the clerk. It will be translated and shared with the rest of the committee.

I appreciate your tolerance of this, Mr. Fortin. Thank you.

You may resume. I paused the clock. You haven't lost any time.

[Cherry Smiley]

Okay. Thank you. I'll skip ahead a bit.

If you believe that sex is work, then you believe that men are entitled to sex acts from women and that women are obligated to provide sex acts to men. Instead of in marriage, however, now the context is prostitution. This is how the idea of sex work is inherently patriarchal.

My second point is about the source of harm in prostitution. The source of harm in prostitution is the men and the sex acts that they demand from women. Additional harms include being stabbed, shot, beaten and so on. I'm sure there are days when many of you don't feel like coming to work and performing your job duties, but you do, because you don't want to get fired and because you need to get paid. When we decide that sex is work, this means that there are women coming in to their workplaces not wanting to perform their job duties, but doing so anyways, because they don't want to get fired and because they need to get paid—only these job duties are unwanted sex acts, such as blow jobs and anal penetration, instead of filing reports or attending meetings.

Women who engage in sex acts with men they do not sexually desire are harmed mentally, emotionally and physically. We call this rape or sexual assault. The exchange of money or goods doesn't change this. Women in prostitution are not a special kind of human who can handle things that other humans can't.

Lastly, I want to speak about the research I did in New Zealand. I learned that sex work works—only it works to uphold male domination and female subordination. The New Zealand model is the model for you if you want to shamelessly encourage and facilitate men to exploit and profit from women's inequality.

I also learned that prostitution is so embedded in the culture and landscape of Aotearoa that it's a non-issue. This has happened for many reasons, one being that when prostitution was being debated prior to the adoption of the Prostitution Reform Act in 2003, the feminist argument that prostitution is a form of male violence against women was dismissed as being useless, when actually a feminist understanding of male violence against women is essential to understanding prostitution.

Knowing that feminists were not heard in the debates leading up to New Zealand's celebrated Prostitution Reform Act gives more context to the present-day silence surrounding prostitution in the country. This should be cause for great concern, as women's sex-based equality concerns were and are dismissed as irrelevant when it comes to prostitution in New Zealand. The current regime there reflects this. For example, there are no exiting services in New Zealand. Why would there be?

In New Zealand and elsewhere, sex work advocates do not understand male violence against women and how it functions. We can see this clearly when sex work advocates regurgitate the lie that women can tell which man will be violent and which man won't through the use of unspecified screening tools. Whether women screen for two minutes on the street, a week on a dating app, or for 10 years in a relationship, women cannot tell which man will be violent and which man won't. To say that she can ultimately blames her if male violence is committed against her: She failed to screen properly.

To get rid of PCEPA is short-sighted and anti-woman. Gillian Abel, a sex work researcher, has stated that sex work policies “tend to focus on the outcomes of social inequality, rather like the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff”. We need to keep and strengthen PCEPA. Women in Canada deserve nothing less.

[The Chair, Liberal, Randeep Sarai]

Thank you.

I'll now go to our first round of questions with Mr. Morrison for six minutes.

[Rob Morrison, Conservative, Kootenay—Columbia, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all the panellists today in the first hour and the second hour.

It's really important for us as parliamentarians to be able to get information from academics, researchers, panellists and victim services groups, but it's also heartwarming to hear personal stories.

Ms. Smith, your adventure in life that was so horrific is really heartwarming, and I'm so glad you decided to attempt today to share your story, which is really difficult to listen to, to be honest with you.

I want to ask you a question about your experience. It's very important for us to hear the life experience of people who have gone through some problems within the sex trade such as trafficking or violence.

From your experience, if we were to eliminate these laws or laws like them, do you think that vulnerable victims like you when you were younger would be safer or more protected than they are now?

[Kelsey Smith]

That's a very hard question because I do agree in some respects with what people were saying before about how some people aren't willing to come forward as much if they're criminalized or, when they see something that obviously shouldn't be happening, they would be less likely to report a youth.

I really strongly believe that even upholding laws that people wouldn't be allowed.... I feel like having these laws would deter people in the first place from seeking out sex work. I think, when you take away some of the demand.... The people who trafficked me wouldn't have had a market to do so.

[Rob Morrison, Conservative, Kootenay—Columbia, BC]

Thanks so much.

One quick follow-up question to that is: What do you think we could do that would enhance PCEPA to help more people?

[Kelsey Smith]

I think that it's important, especially for girls who.... It did take me about five years to even recognize the patterns of trafficking in my own life, so I was trafficked even before this law was passed. It would have just given me an option to even just hold anyone accountable for what happened to me. I just think that it's really important for girls to feel safe, so I do think.... I'm sorry, I'm kind of botching your question.

I'm not really sure what to add to it, just maybe some more bridging between this and human trafficking because I know there is such a strong correlation.

[Rob Morrison, Conservative, Kootenay—Columbia, BC]

Perfect. We've had lots of different witnesses come before us in a PCEPA review, and I think there's really a difference in how police across Canada are enforcing or looking at PCEPA. I can certainly see some improvements on educating police and having standardized enforcement, that sort of thing. I can see that being a move forward.

Ms. Smiley, I'll ask you one of the same questions because we always want to know how can we do things better. How could we improve PCEPA?

[Cherry Smiley]

There are a few ways that could happen. One is that we know that PCEPA hasn't been applied consistently across the country. There are lots of areas, for example, the City of Vancouver, where the police force has said it's the lowest priority and that they're basically not going to enforce these laws. I think that there needs to be actual enforcement of the laws to begin with.

Second, we really do need to look at this holistically. I am an indigenous woman. I come from a background of being raised by my grandmother and understanding things in a more kind of holistic manner. Once we have that law where we're criminalizing the demand, that's a great step, but we need to have more options for women.

Welfare rates are abysmal. Lack of housing and women's poverty, all of these issues are very interconnected, and they cannot be separated from prostitution, so we really need to be putting more money into services for women and their children.

Last, have a proper, solid public education campaign, as I mentioned in my presentation. A lot of people don't understand prostitution in a way that is feminist, so it's understood in a way that it's just a normal, natural part of life, so we really need to do some education to begin to undo those myths and really kind of get to the heart of prostitution.

[Rob Morrison, Conservative, Kootenay—Columbia, BC]

I only have about 30 seconds left.

You mentioned that you looked at the New Zealand model. How do you think Canada would fare if we totally dropped PCEPA and didn't have any enforcement at all?

[Cherry Smiley]

It would be absolutely horrible. It's so embedded. It's like going to the grocery store—this idea that it's totally okay to buy women and girls. There are lots of Maori women and girls who are still out on the street. You see women being brought in from Asian countries. It's a mess.

[Rob Morrison, Conservative, Kootenay—Columbia, BC]

Thank you so much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Randeep Sarai]

Mr. Naqvi, you have six minutes.

[Yasir Naqvi, Liberal, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Thank you very much.

I'm going to direct my questions to Ms. Sayers. Thank you very much for appearing.

I'll pick up where Mr. Morrison left off in terms of looking at the New Zealand model. Before I do that, can I ask about your suggestions or recommendations to us, as a committee? What do you think we should do with PCEPA?

[Naomi Sayers]

I think it's really important that we turn our minds to Bedford and what Bedford said, because Bedford was very clear on what Parliament could do or could not do. The DOJ turned around and said, “Hey look, we made it compliant with Bedford” and now we're having this review and we're saying, “Look at all of this data and look at all of these great benefits”, but that's not what Bedford says is applicable.

The intent informs all of the law, so you have to look at what the intent is of what we're doing here. Senator Plett admitted that we don't want to make it safe—we want to do away with prostitution. With that comes the corollary that people will lose their lives. In Bedford, the evidence was dead sex workers.

[Yasir Naqvi, Liberal, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Is it your advice to us that we repeal PCEPA in its entirety?

[Naomi Sayers]

Yes, that is correct. I don't think there will be any gaps, because, as Ms. Davis said earlier, the police need the tools to rely on the other provisions that are there in the code. She didn't say that word for word, but she alluded to it in that way.

[Yasir Naqvi, Liberal, Ottawa Centre, ON]

We've seen, quite often, in this committee—and we saw some testimony in this panel, as well—that sex work and human trafficking can be conflated.

In your experience as somebody, as you mentioned, who was a sex worker—and as a lawyer—can you highlight the differences between the two? How do we bring regard to the differences between those who are sex workers by choice and those who may be human-trafficked?

[Naomi Sayers]

We have to remember that—I said this in 2014—choice is such a complicated topic. People make different choices every single day for many reasons, and the contexts in which those choices are made vary. Today, we have laws that.... I don't think they help make the prosecution of human trafficking easier, and I don't think they help sex workers, because they capture some of their activities.

One example would be living and working in the same space. If somebody were driving their friend, that would also potentially capture.... Is that human trafficking, or not? We get into this debate about which laws apply and which don't. It makes the job hard for the prosecutors. We have to remember that those roles are very important, too.

In terms of human trafficking, as my co-panellist Ms. Smiley was saying, we need to support the issues before they get there. This law is, as Ms. Davis was saying, a reactive law. It's not a proactive law.

[Yasir Naqvi, Liberal, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Thank you.

Let me ask you a question about the New Zealand model. I don't know if you've had the chance to look at the legislative scheme there. Generally speaking, what are your thoughts on what New Zealand is doing?

[Naomi Sayers]

We have to remember that New Zealand is a unitary state. In Canada, we have a blessing and a curse, where we have federal, provincial, regional, municipal and first nations.... You have a lot of different contexts for how sex work may look in different regions. How it looks in Toronto isn't the same as how it looks in northern Ontario. To ask, “Should we adopt the New Zealand model?” is too simple. There needs to be a much more informed approach taken by this committee.

I would like to correct the record. Migrant workers are targeted in New Zealand. If you look at the previous briefs that were submitted, especially by Jamie Liew and the Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform.... People don't just get brought in to work freely. They are targeted, as well.

[Yasir Naqvi, Liberal, Ottawa Centre, ON]

I'm hearing a bit of caution from you also. If we look at the New Zealand model, we have to look at it from a Canadian perspective and the differences that exist between Canada and New Zealand, not just in terms of our constitutional status, but also lived experience.

Is that what I'm hearing from you?

[Naomi Sayers]

Yes, that is correct.

My brief, which I filed on Wednesday evening, I think draws attention to sort of the soup of regulations that target the sex trade, in terms of municipal regulations, what's unregulated, what's not regulated, what's legalized and what's not legalized.

I think we really need to take a step back and remove ourselves from this New Zealand-model approach. I'm not saying don't decriminalize, but I'm saying that the New Zealand model oversimplifies things.

[Yasir Naqvi, Liberal, Ottawa Centre, ON]

It's a good caution, and thank you for sharing that with us.

I've have very limited time, so my last question for you will be, if we want to decriminalize in Canada, and of course the health and safety of sex workers is paramount, what would be your one key piece of advice to us that we should consider as we develop recommendations?