Good afternoon.
I had planned to give my presentation in French, but given how little time I have, I will give it in English. I'll be able to get through it faster.
I'm the executive director of Stella, l'amie de Maimie. We're an organization by and for sex workers. We were founded in Montreal 25 years ago. Every year we make, on average, between 5,000 and 8,000 contacts with sex workers here in Montreal. We are fully by and for sex workers, meaning that our staff, our board, our members are sex workers ourselves. We represent and are accountable to our community.
As you probably know, in the Bedford case of the Supreme Court, criminalization of sex work was declared unconstitutional on the basis that it violated our rights to health and safety.
That right to safety which the Supreme Court talked about is precisely the right to not be murdered, the way Marylène Levesque was. The response of the government at the time was to fully criminalize sex work for the first time in the history of Canada and create a set of laws that does not aim to protect us, that does not aim to improve our working conditions, that does not aim to make sure we can screen clients appropriately. The only objective of this law is to eradicate sex workers from Canada. When we have a government that chooses as an objective the elimination of sex workers, we cannot be surprised when aggressors choose to be violent towards us and take up that call to eradicate sex workers from Canada.
It's pretty rare that Parliament cares about sex workers and invites us to speak, and we know there has been no such committee for the dozens of other sex workers who have been murdered since this change in the law.
Specifically in the case of Marylène Levesque, many parts of this story are very clearly tied to the criminalization of sex work. We can look at the fact this man had been a client of a massage parlour on several occasions and had been banned from that massage parlour because he was violent. It was impossible for that massage parlour at the time to call the police or to call the Parole Board because sex work is criminalized and calling the police on a violent client usually means maybe people getting arrested, people losing their source of income, attracting more police repression to our workspaces. As sex workers, it's not possible for us to do that. If they had been able to contact the police or the parole officer when he first acted violently towards a sex worker, he would have been sent back to prison and would not have had the opportunity to escalate his violence and murder Marylène Levesque.
We also know that hotels have been targeted by police repression when it comes to sex work. In the summer of 2019 police forces across Quebec launched RADAR to encourage hotels and other tourism businesses to detect sex workers and to report them to police under the guise of potentially protecting them from exploitation. We know that when Marylène Levesque walked into that hotel on that night she was preoccupied with making sure she was not detected as a sex worker. She could not tell the receptionist she was seeing a client and that if she wasn't seen in an hour or two could she be checked on. She couldn't make any arrangements for her protection because that would have led to being detected, being kicked out of the hotel and possibly arrested or having her money seized.
We also know as sex workers that when we're victims of violence, when a situation is scary with a client, we might not scream. We might try to de-escalate on our own, because we know that if we make a scene in a space like a hotel, we will face the consequences of the criminalization of sex work.
It's very clear that the criminal laws against sex work that are in place put Marylène Levesque in a position where she was not able to screen her clients. No client will agree to provide ID and go through a background check before booking an appointment in a context where he can be arrested for buying sex.
We also see in the reaction to this murder that the response from Corrections Canada and the Parole Board have been mostly to say that they are against the purpose of sex, period. Once again we're focusing on sex work as the harm instead of the actual violence that someone has experienced.
I don't have a lot of time, but one important point I want to make is that this is not a tragedy; this is not irrational or hard to predict. This is the direct effect of the decision the government made in 2014 to criminalize sex work. It is the continued impact and it is to be expected. More sex workers will be murdered if we keep these laws.
The only recommendation this committee needs to start with is the full decriminalization of sex work.
I represent thousands of women. A lot of us have been victims of violence. A lot of us could have been Marylène Levesque.
We know for a fact that if Marylène Levesque were sitting in front of you today fighting for her rights to work safely, you would be dismissing her the same way you've been dismissing sex workers for over 40 years and refusing to give us the rights that we should have.
I encourage you to make sure that the work of this committee leads to actually respecting sex workers, understanding that we will continue to exist and continue to work, and giving up this foolish and problematic quest to eradicate us from Canada. We need to be talking about our rights as workers.
We need to be making sure that we don't just pass the blame to the Parole Board of Canada and Corrections Canada, because in many cases this murder could have happened with no involvement from Corrections Canada, the same way that many sex workers have been murdered in the past few years. I would even add that on the same night Marylène Levesque was murdered in Quebec City, another young sex worker was murdered in Montreal. No one has been talking about her death, and there hasn't even been a proper investigation.
That is the reality of all marginalized sex workers across Canada. We die. We hold vigils for ourselves and try to be resilient, but Parliament maintains the position that we should be criminalized.