Evidence of meeting #60 for Status of Women in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was police.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Bloc
Louise Chabot Bloc Thérèse-De Blainville, QC
Would you say that the number of people who did not make that choice initially is growing? Are you serving more of them than you used to?
Executive Director, Stella, l'amie de Maimie
It's not necessarily growing. I would say, though, that since the legislative changes in 2014, we're finding that it's much more difficult for such individuals to get out of these situations. In Quebec, hundreds of millions of dollars are being invested in the fight against sexual exploitation. The result is that they've completely lost access to all kinds of services because they have to identify themselves as victims, which they don't want to do.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Karen Vecchio
Excellent. Thank you so much.
Leah, you have two and a half minutes.
NDP
Leah Gazan NDP Winnipeg Centre, MB
Thank you so much, Chair.
Building on what you just said, Ms. Wesley—and I think it feeds into what I was saying—no means no. That's not consent. If there are sexual actions happening without consent, that's assault. When it's happening to a minor, that's child sexual exploitation. Then we have sex work, which is different. It's consensual.
Do you think by conflating it...? I feel it actually places kids at risk. Certainly, in Manitoba, where we have the highest number of kids in care, there are kids who are having sex, but it's not consensual. It's normalized child sexual exploitation. That's one thing I want you to answer.
The second thing is that I've been pushing for a guaranteed livable basic income. If we want to talk about people making good and bad choices, we have to give people real choices. I don't think there is choice. However you end up in sex work for whatever reason, if we want people to choose otherwise, I don't know of many choices.
Do you think a guaranteed livable basic income would provide people with choices should they choose not to stay in the sex work industry?
I'll give that to Ms. Sinclaire, because you're from my home province here.
Member, Sex Workers of Winnipeg Action Coalition
Yes. It's really important to note that, with kids in care, I think the whole care system is inherently flawed, and there's a lot of deflecting that happens. We just say, “Oh, it's trafficking; it's traffickers”. There's a reason folks are ending up in bad situations.
As you said, if people are being failed by systems and ending up in bad situations, just saying, “Oh, well, we need to end all sex work, and we need to eradicate sex work” is completely missing the point of the issue. We're talking about a guaranteed basic livable income and that sort of thing. It helps to allow people to make choices that suit them so they don't actually have to worry about finding housing. We hear a lot of quotes about people wanting handbags and being lured in by that sort of thing, but people want a place to live. They want to be safe. They want food. They want a supporting community. If we're not allowing them to have that, then, yes, we're failing them.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Karen Vecchio
Thank you so much.
On behalf of the committee, I would really like to thank you for coming in today. We are going to suspend for just a few minutes because we have a lot of committee business to get through.
I'm going to remind you that we're going to go in camera. We can have one staff member per individual and one person from the party only, and I'd ask all others to leave.
We'll suspend for a maximum of two minutes. Thanks.
We're suspending.
[Proceedings continue in camera]