Status of Women Committee on March 27th, 2023

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Are you saying that I let off a lot of hot air there, Megan?

I'm going to move it on [Inaudible—Editor] to Leah.

[Leah Gazan, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

I'll be blunt here. I'm all into keeping people alive and into harm reduction.

I want to point to the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls call for justice 9.11, which, in a synopsis, calls “upon police services to develop and implement guidelines” for the sex industry in consultation with sex workers. It says in call 4.3 that we call on the government “to support programs and services for Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people in the sex industry to promote their safety and security”, and then it goes on.

I say that because I find that a lot of the laws, and even some of the interventions, are being put in place without sex workers or people involved in the industry being included, and it's causing women, girls and diverse-gendered folks to actually be unsafe. Could you expand on that, please, Madam Snider?

[Krystal Snider]

Yes. Again to that point, having representation from the people who are impacted is so important. You know, one very unique area that we're not talking about today is rural communities. Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit folks are in lots of rural communities. The issues are nuanced, and they are layered.

Policing relationships with communities are quite strained. How are we expected to build relationships and to address an issue when a lot of the violence is coming from the people enforcing the laws onto the people who are supposed to be protected?

[Leah Gazan, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

I would add to that. I've brought it up in other committees. There have been several reports, in fact, of RCMP being engaged in sex trafficking, for example, or violence against indigenous women. Is that what you've witnessed in your research?

[Krystal Snider]

Yes. I think what can be difficult is to ask survivors to come forward to police when we know that a lot of times police are purchasing. That's not exclusive to police. It's not only police who purchase, but it is connected, and it's hard to come forward.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Krystal, thank you so much.

On behalf of the Status of Women Committee, I would like to thank Krystal, Diane and Megan for coming here and providing us your insights.

We'll now be switching up. We're going to suspend for about a minute. As I said, the next hour is actually 45 minutes. Stay tuned.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

I'm going to start the meeting because I know that time is very tight. Could I just ask everybody to bring it down? We're reconvening this meeting.

I would like to welcome our witnesses, who are online and in the room. In the room, we have the Sex Workers of Winnipeg Action Coalition, with Kate Sinclaire. Online, from the Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform, we have Jenn Clamen, who is the national coordinator.

I'm just going to let everybody know that we are still having some computer issues. This is where I need everybody to play along. If your computer goes on and you're not speaking, make sure you turn it off if there's one close to you. If not, we'll have to restart the whole system. I'm just trying to save us all time.

I'm going to pass the floor over to Jenn Clamen online for her opening five minutes.

Once again, everybody, please watch your mikes.

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

Our member groups across the country represent the experiences of thousands of sex workers who sell or trade sexual services. Our members have extensive personal expertise in mitigating interpersonal and state violence and labour exploitation. They also have experiences of the impacts of anti-trafficking initiatives.

“Human trafficking” is a loaded term used in this committee and elsewhere to describe everything from intimate partner violence to sex work to labour exploitation.

The other day, one MP in this committee was talking about sextortion as trafficking. Last week and this morning, you heard from anti-trans and anti-sex work groups who define prostitution as trafficking. Increasingly we see conflation of the different kinds of violence and things that aren't violence packaged as human trafficking. The first line of work that this committee must do is untangle, and be much more critical of, the anti-trafficking paradigm.

These conflations are part of the reason that you can't seem to pinpoint the statistics you're desperately looking for. When violence against sex workers is defined as sex trafficking, it creates a framework that grossly overstates statistics and mandates police to surveil the lives of already criminalized communities. This conflation obscures responses to the real structural problems of targeted violence, poverty, homelessness, housing and lack of education. It is disingenuous to package these concerns and lack of opportunities as human trafficking. Anti-trafficking measures put marginalized communities at risk of violence.

Any measure of protection that relies on policing and surveilling our most marginalized communities to fulfill its mandate, the way that anti-trafficking measures do, is neither protective nor feminist. Indigenous women who live and work in public space bear a huge brunt of this.

All indigenous women who sell or trade sex are assumed to be trafficked, but many do sex work as a means of generating money or resources in a context of poverty. Negating the agency of indigenous women who sell sexual services and labelling them as victims deflects from recognizing the numerous ways that a colonial state reproduces violence, injustices and other harms, including displacement, homelessness, poverty, racism, inequality and barriers to accessing services, supports and resources. Loitering laws, public space violations, sex work laws and drug laws are used to target and arrest indigenous women and mandate police to detect, not protect.

Migrant sex workers experience threats of detention and deportation that push them into precarious working conditions, increase vulnerabilities to labour exploitation and deter them from seeking supports.

Police pair up with the Canada Border Services Agency to surveil indoor workspaces where migrant, racialized workers labour, and they use criminal laws, IRPR provisions that prohibit sex work, and municipal bylaws in so-called protective anti-trafficking efforts. Anti-trafficking initiatives are underpinned by racist and anti-migrant ideologies. Racialized communities are characterized as supposed organized crime rings. At last week's session, one MP asked how many foreign perpetrators are coming abroad illegally. She recognized that there is no data to back this up.

Black sex workers experience their share of racism. They are overrepresented in street checks and experience over-policing and underprotection on a regular basis.

Removing laws that criminalize the lives of marginalized sex workers who are currently criminalized, regardless of the lies you were just told, will not increase violence and most definitely will reduce it.

Anti-trafficking enforcement is a source of harm for all sex workers. It causes antagonism and a lack of trust. It causes violence by police and by others, and it causes people to lose mobility, lose opportunity and lose access.

We have some concrete solutions for you. You need to start with law reform.

First is to remove criminal, immigration and municipal laws and regulations. Repeal PCEPA, the sex work laws. As long as any part of sex work is criminalized, sex workers are unlikely to report. Remove the bylaws that allow entry into predominantly migrant sex work spaces. Repeal the IRPR regulations that prohibit sex work. CBSA needs to stop “visiting” massage parlours. Expunge sex workers' records for sex work convictions that impede economic and physical mobility.

Two, immediately ensure full and permanent immigration status for all in Canada without exception and provide everybody with access-without-fear services.

Three, reframe funding and policy initiatives so that they are not dependent on anti-human trafficking frameworks. Anti-trafficking services, including most victim funds, are a barrier to sex workers' getting support. They require sex workers to identify as victims of human trafficking or to exit sex work. In this vein, you need to recognize sex work as work in policy and practice. That means investment in addressing labour exploitation and improving working conditions for sex workers.

Four, invest money in sex worker-led community initiatives, indigenous sex worker groups, migrant sex worker groups and Black sex worker groups. They all exist. Groups you heard from this morning, as with Krystal, literally dictate and define women's experiences for them. We need non-judgmental programs that don't seek to minimize opportunities for sex work or that seek to abolish or conflate sex work with trafficking.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Thanks very much.

We're now going to pass it to Kate Sinclaire for five minutes.

[Kate Sinclaire, Member, Sex Workers of Winnipeg Action Coalition]

Thank you very much for having me here.

My name is Kate Sinclaire. I am currently studying law here in Ottawa. I'm a member of the Sex Workers of Winnipeg Action Coalition. SWWAC is a group of sex workers, activists, allies and researchers and is based back in my home town of Winnipeg, Manitoba, on Treaty 1 territory, and was founded in 2014. We have a clear mission to fight exploitation, not sex workers.

We can't keep trying to end abuse by criminalizing and surveilling sex workers. These laws and policies often place the blame for trafficking directly on sex workers themselves, creating a simultaneous victim and abuser identity that is impossible to navigate. It encourages law enforcement to drop in on sex workers with “wellness checks” and empowers raids, arrests, deportation and other forms of state violence.

A story that might help you understand this comes from my own life working in queer adult film. I was contacted out of the blue by a sex worker I had never met. She was trying to double-check if she was going to have an audition with my company. This was the first I'd heard of it, because I don't hold auditions. As it turns out, someone was using my reputation and status as a filmmaker to lure sex workers to a rural address.

He was stealing my name to get free sex, which is abuse. He knew that the systems that criminalize workers and their clients actually benefited him, and he was right. We realized that we couldn't come forward to report this man to police. The worker was rightly, and from experience, more concerned about being arrested herself, losing her income and losing her kids. Why? It's because of laws and attitudes that cast sex workers as both traffickers and trafficked, victims and abusers.

We had his address and we could not come forward, so we did what we could to keep people in the area safe. We posted warnings online. We reached out to local sex worker groups. We tried our best to keep others from accepting his pitch. Keep in mind that policing the Internet and physical spaces to keep sex work invisible and as far away from the community as possible means that warnings can only go so far. It has only gotten worse in recent years with anti-trafficking legislation in digital spheres.

If we want to address harm, we need to step back and look at the circumstances that Canada has put in place to put people there, such as oppressive immigration systems, criminalization of sex work, poverty, access to housing, a race to the bottom in worker rights and minimum wages, poor support for those living with disabilities and police surveillance of marginalized communities.

Going forward, think of support, not more criminalization in a system that is already hostile to women, girls, and gender-diverse folks. Don't think in patronizing “deportation and incarceration will save you” attitudes.

Sex workers have been supporting our communities while being criminalized for a long time. Keep us at your discussion tables, fund sex worker-led programs and listen when we speak. Start with an end to laws against sex work. Provide immigration status for migrant sex workers, affordable housing and a guaranteed basic livable income.

We have laws around trafficking. We have laws, and if they aren't working or being used, we need to analyze why, not make new laws that will just uphold the status quo.

I'll wrap up with another story from an indigenous prairie sex worker, who wrote, “When I was a youth, I was houseless and participated in survival street sex work. Having been a sex worker is something I've always been open about in my writing, activism and scholarship. I'm not ashamed, because I am describing a common experience for indigenous prairie youth. Anti-sex work rhetoric is anti-Black, anti-indigenous, whorephobic, transmisogynistic and classist, no matter how you try to dress it up in the aesthetics of resistance and decoloniality. To circulate anti-sex work rhetoric is to have indigenous blood on your hands. The violent force that pushed me into sex work was Canada and Canadians.”

We as SWWAC remind you to fight exploitation, not sex workers. Together, we can make a safer world for everyone.

Thank you very much, and I do welcome any questions that you may have.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Thank you very much for both of your opening statements.

We will now start our first round.

To let you know, we'll be stopping at 12:45 today, because we have business that we need to get into. We're tight at 12:45.

Michelle, I'm passing it over to you for six minutes.

[Michelle Ferreri, Conservative, Peterborough—Kawartha, ON]

Thanks, Madam Chair, and thank you to the witnesses.

I'm going to ask both of you ladies, if you're okay, to answer this question.

What do you think the government is not delivering in what it said it would deliver to help improve and reduce human trafficking in our country? I don't mean improve human trafficking, but reduce it and improve.... You know what I'm trying to say there.

[Kate Sinclaire]

That works.

I think there have been promises to work on the decriminalization of sex work and there have been promises to offer safe spaces for migrant workers, and we haven't seen any of that. We instead saw a consultation with the justice committee around the current sex work law, PCEPA, that really just maintained the status quo. They just said, “Okay, we're going to listen to these anti-trafficking groups instead of listening to sex workers.” We've shown up at these panels many times, and for some reason we just keep getting brushed aside, kind of like a tick box to have at the committees. Then they just don't take our recommendations, which has been really frustrating.

Immediate work can be taken to decriminalize sex work as a starting point.

I can toss it to Jenn for any additional comments. She may have more to say.

[Jenn Clamen]

Thanks, Kate. You did a great job of that. I appreciate it.

The government has most definitely.... It's all of the governments. There used to be an idea that only the Conservative government was heavily leaning into enforcing law and putting money into law enforcement, but now we have all the governments sort of leaning on law enforcement as a solution to almost every social problem that exists.

You've been told time and time again—not just by me and Kate this morning, but by people in various communities, including at the missing and murdered Indigenous women's committee—that law enforcement is actually not reducing violence of any kind. I really think that needs to be taken seriously, and that less money needs to be poured into law enforcement. I—

[Michelle Ferreri, Conservative, Peterborough—Kawartha, ON]

Sorry; may I just interject and question you on something there, Ms. Clamen? Do you not think that bail reform for people who are committing crimes should be enforced, then?

I understand the aspect of victims and survivors, but from what I just heard you say, it sounds like you're saying we shouldn't be putting criminals behind bars.

[Jenn Clamen]

I definitely didn't say not to use the criminal law under any conditions. I most definitely didn't say that. I said that there is too much money being poured into this notion of human trafficking and that there are no supports for people who are actually experiencing violence. That's what I'm trying to say.

Also, what I've been seeing in human trafficking initiatives, policies and discussions—because there have been many over the years—is that more money just keeps going into law enforcement, while very little money actually goes back into communities to address the violence that people are experiencing.

One of the other things that has been recommended to this government on many occasions, including at the last justice committee review of the sex work laws, is the removal of the provisions within the immigrant and refugee protections regulations that make it illegal for people to work in the sex industry. The harms of creating that barrier have been demonstrated in statistics and reports that I'm happy to send to you.

There are a lot of pieces of law reform that this government isn't doing and, as I said in my talk, that's where you need to start.

[Michelle Ferreri, Conservative, Peterborough—Kawartha, ON]

I appreciate that. Thanks for clarifying. I was just making sure I understood correctly.

[Jenn Clamen]

I most definitely wouldn't say not to.... For violence that people are experiencing, I'm saying not to add additional laws to that and not to lean in on laws that are not helping the situation, like the sex work laws, for example. Those are most definitely not reducing violence against women, and they are most definitely increasing violence against women, so I would repeal those laws.

[Michelle Ferreri, Conservative, Peterborough—Kawartha, ON]

Okay. Thank you so much for clarifying.

I guess one thing that has been really shocking in having some of the bureaucrats testify in this committee when we're investigating and trying to help victims and survivors of human trafficking is the lack of data. It is shocking to me.

Ms. Sinclaire, you talked a lot about how a lot of the survivors can't or don't want to come forward, and we've heard about this as well. It's very hard to have testimony to put someone behind bars or to stop something because it's very hard for the survivor to come forward, and we don't want to revictimize. We don't want to retraumatize.

These numbers we are seeing are false. What do you suggest as solutions in order to get the data that we need?

[Kate Sinclaire]

It's really important to know that the data is false because, as mentioned previously, a lot of this data includes people who are consensually working in sex work. A lot of the anti-trafficking groups specifically conflate the two so that it seems like it's a bigger problem than it is—not to say that it isn't a big problem.

If you are looking to get data, what you really need to do is build up relationships of trust with communities so that people feel comfortable coming forward, because we can't study something that can't be studied. If it's actually just pushed further and further down, we can't do any of that kind of study.

Really, it comes down to building relationships.

[Michelle Ferreri, Conservative, Peterborough—Kawartha, ON]

I'll just make a quick comment. I'm not sure if you guys have watched Money Shot, the Pornhub documentary. It's the number two documentary right now. It's a very interesting dissection on the difference between those who are exploited and those who are sex workers, and it includes testimony by members of the Canadian Parliament.

I'm just curious if you could, in 10 seconds, give us your thoughts on it, Ms. Sinclaire.

[Kate Sinclaire]

That documentary, I think, is really important, because it does give the mike to workers. There were anti-trafficking groups involved in it who spoke, and it really exposed just how biased all of their data is. It's really important to listen to the workers.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Thank you so much.

We're now going to move online to Emmanuella Lambropoulos.

Emmanuella, I'm turning the floor over to you for six minutes.

[Emmanuella Lambropoulos, Liberal, Saint-Laurent, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I just want to apologize in advance in case I say anything that's ignorant. I am trying to learn and I'm here to listen.

I'm obviously hearing from different witnesses here today who have pointed to people who are not necessarily the people to be listening to, and that's where we're getting our information from, so I apologize in advance for that.

I want to take something that was suggested earlier by a previous witness and hear the thoughts of the witnesses currently before us. One of our witnesses, Krystal Snider, mentioned that we should be implementing or putting into place the UN non-punishment principle for people who are being trafficked or who are being controlled by a trafficker. There was some push-back from another witness within that same panel, who said that women who are trafficked are not prosecuted.

I'm wondering if you guys can clarify that and tell me what your thoughts are on that as well.

[Jenn Clamen]

I can go first, if that's okay, Kate.

I really appreciated when Krystal Snider corrected the misinformation you were being fed by the two people who actually don't have experience in the industry but who just have analysis based on their ideology. What Krystal was suggesting is most definitely the case.

For one, many sex workers and family members and communities are arrested with trafficking laws because of the ways family members or community members are labelled as traffickers or assumed to be traffickers. I think some of the racist undertones are the ways communities get racialized in this process.

A really good indicator of how that process works is that we often see cases of Black men trafficking white women, or there's the idea that foreign illegals are trafficking white women, so a lot of those ideas get translated through law enforcement.

What the committee members earlier were talking to is the way the sex laws under PCEPA work, and the sex work laws under PCEPA absolutely criminalize all people in the sex industry, including sex workers. One of the members of this committee asked for a copy of the clause. It's in the criminal law. It's under PCEPA, so you have access to it. It's in your own laws.

Those criminal laws most definitely criminalize sex workers in the industry. There's a clause that suggests that sex workers cannot be prosecuted for the sale of their own sexual services, but sex work and sex workers are criminalized at all times in every context. Just because sex workers can't be prosecuted doesn't mean sex workers are not operating and living in a context of criminality. That's the way the sex workers organize their work, and that will determine whether or not sex workers will report to police.

Everything about sex work is illegal, and sex workers are at all times criminalized, so when you have human trafficking laws plus sex work laws plus the additional immigration provisions plus the bylaws plus the loitering, etc., the context of criminalization for people working in the sex industry is unbearable and most definitely not a trust-creating one.