moved:
That a special committee of the House be appointed to review the solicitation laws in order to improve the safety of sex-trade workers and communities overall, and to recommend changes that will reduce the exploitation and violence against sex-trade workers.
Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague, the member for Burnaby--Douglas, for seconding the motion today.
I am very pleased to rise in the House today to debate the motion and to hear the comments and views of members from other parties.
The motion is votable so it will have three hours of debate and this is the first hour. I will read the motion for the people who are watching the debate today.
That a special committee of the House be appointed to review the solicitation laws in order to improve the safety of sex-trade workers and communities overall, and to recommend changes that will reduce the exploitation and violence against sex-trade workers.
I want to give a little background on the motion. The reason I brought this forward and the reason it is an issue of great significance and concern not just to me and my community in East Vancouver but, I think, to a number of cities across Canada is that a lot of evidence and reports have shown that the federal soliciting laws are actually putting a lot of women who are on the street at risk.
I first became concerned about this issue as a result of the situation in Vancouver's downtown east side where, as I am sure members are aware, a terrible tragedy has been unfolding. As of now 63 women, all of whom were involved in the sex trade in terms of street soliciting, have gone missing and many of them, if not all of them, may have been murdered. We now have the largest serial murder case in Canada's history unfolding out of Port Coquitlam as a result of the 15 murder charges that have been laid.
While that investigation has been going on, I have been working in my community in the downtown east side with local organizations that provide services and interventions with regard to street prostitution. While there are many questions about this horrific situation of missing women in Vancouver, there are many serious questions about the police investigations and why it took so long for a special task force to be put together to investigate the disappearance of these women. I think many of us wonder, had these women not been sex trade workers or prostitutes, whether the investigation would have been treated differently, at a much earlier date and with much more urgent priority.
In speaking briefly about the investigation, the many serious questions that arise as a result of the murder investigation and the fact that there is a need to have a public inquiry, I also want to put forward that there are still women who are at risk on a daily basis, not only in that community but in many communities across Canada. They are at risk because of neglect, stigmatization and the failure of governments to act.
While media attention is focused on the murder investigation that is taking place, many organizations and individuals in the downtown east side are pointing to the urgency of the situation still facing women who are at risk on a daily and nightly basis in the community.
It was because of some of the underlying issues around the role the Criminal Code plays in the laws pertaining to solicitation, around policing issues and around the marginalization and criminalization of sex trade workers that I brought forward the motion. I believe we need a review of the federal laws pertaining to solicitation that put so many of these women on the street at risk. It is important that we not only try to improve their safety and reduce violence and exploitation but that we also try to improve safety overall in the community.
I think some members of the House who have been around for a long time will remember that in 1985 the Fraser commission did a very thorough review of Canada's laws pertaining to solicitation and the sex trade. Hearings were held across Canada
I was a member of the Vancouver city council at the time the commission did its study. I remember very well the debate and the controversy around the Fraser commission. There was a lot of focus on street soliciting and the fact that many neighbourhoods were complaining about soliciting and the impact of prostitution, safety issues, traffic issues, cars driving around, johns and pimps. In many Canadian cities, including Ottawa, it was an issue that sparked debate with many different points of view.
What came out of the Fraser commission was a subsequent change in the law that dealt with communicating for the purposes of soliciting. The review of that law has shown that over the years since 1985 there has been no substantial change from the point of view of either increasing safety or law and order in local communities. Also, there has been no improvement in the marginalization and stigmatization faced by women who are involved in the sex trade. This becomes another reason that we need to have a review of the federal laws as they are today. We have not really had that kind of discussion since 1985.
One of the real problems we are facing is that prostitution itself is not illegal. Communicating, keeping a common body house, pimping, all of those activities of soliciting is illegal but in many communities off street prostitution is well tolerated. If we were to look through the yellow pages in any telephone directory we would see page after page of advertisements for escort services.
We have a very contradictory view about prostitution. When it is off street, out of the public eye and invisible there is a high level of tolerance, through law enforcement, municipal licensing and society at large. However when it comes to street prostitution the main instrument still being used to deal with street prostitution is a law enforcement approach.
From all the reports I have read, both nationally and locally in Vancouver because of the violence we have seen and the safety issues, they have basically highlighted how law reform is something that needs to be looked at. We need to have a community discussion involving sex trade workers themselves. We need to know the daily risks they face and what needs to be done, either through law reform, law enforcement, social services support or intervention services counselling, to help women exit the sex trade.
Those are the things that are a daily reality in my community but which get very little attention. What I found in talking to organizations locally is that if anything there is a greater and greater concern that reliance on an enforcement approach to street prostitution without recognizing some of the underlying systemic issues that are forcing women on to the street is creating a situation that is more and more dangerous.
I want to specifically point to some of the work that is being done by John Lowman, a criminologist at Simon Fraser University, who has studied this issue and presented a major paper in 1998 in terms of prostitution and law reform in Canada. He makes the point that Canadian laws in the Criminal Code are very hypocritical and that they allow this tolerance for off street prostitution but that when it comes to street prostitution we are still involved in enforcement that criminalizes women and causes all kinds of difficulties.
The motion before us today is to set up a special committee to review the impact of these laws and what needs to be done. In putting that forward, I am not suggesting what the outcome or conclusion should be.
I do have some opinions about what we should be looking at, but I think it is something that members of the House should be participating in because I know there are various points of view. I do believe that through this debate we will probably see that all of the members from the different parties do have one thing in common and that is the huge concern about the safety issues and the violence issues that are involved. We do have a responsibility to review the Criminal Code and the specific sections of it that pertain to this, to look at how these sections of the Criminal Code are actually increasing the risks sex trade workers face. While there may be different points of view on what we need to do in terms of looking at decriminalization or different kinds of law reform, I think there probably would be a fairly strong consensus that the need to improve safety for individual sex trade workers, as well as the communities at large, is something that is very important.
I think that the way to do this is to have a committee that can examine this issue. In fact, I have been sitting on the Special Committee on Non-medical Use of Drugs and we have been doing exactly this. There are issues that often do not get the kind of attention they need, in a thoughtful way where members can actually examine historical situations and think about what we need to do in terms of law reform or policy development. I support the idea of having a special committee. All members of the House can contribute to the debate and we can go out to the community and speak to people. We can speak to experts like John Lowman and to other organizations. For example, one group in my community, PACE, Prostitution Alternatives Counselling Education, has done research that has involved taking surveys among sex trade workers to find out from those people themselves what their issues and concerns are. While this information is available in the local community and I have seen similar studies from Montreal and similar information from Edmonton, there has been no way to collect this information and actually bring it together in a way such that members of Parliament can have a debate.
Recently I met with the Minister of Justice about the missing women in the downtown east side and I found the minister to be very sympathetic. One of the things I put forward to the minister is that there has been a working group on prostitution at a federal-provincial-territorial level. It reported a couple of years ago, but again, while some of that work was interesting and useful and also focused on the issues of safety and violence, none of that has become public. Again, there has been no public forum through which these issues can be debated. I would very much like to see that happen.
I would certainly encourage members who are speaking to the motion or members who are interested or may even be facing issues in their own community to support the idea of bringing together a special committee. It could be a valuable tool for having that kind of investigative hearing. It is very important that we have community-based research across the country to do a proper evaluation of soliciting and of what we need to do and how as a society we can be more realistic and more understanding of what kinds of public policy decisions need to be made to improve the safety and end the stigmatization of sex trade workers.
One thing I have learned from speaking with many groups is that when people involved in the sex trade become the subject of law enforcement under the Criminal Code and are charged or convicted, they basically end up in a revolving door situation. Then it becomes very difficult to exit the sex trade, because they become very stigmatized and very marginalized. It becomes more and more difficult. I have looked at one of the studies, VIDUS, the Vancouver Injection Drug User Study, which specifically looked at the increase of HIV-AIDS in women. It found that about 75% of study respondents were women involved in the sex trade.
The whole environment that is created in terms of illicit drug use, of being involved in the sex trade and of having very little access to resources makes it very difficult. For example, in my community there is no 24 hour safe house. There is no 24 hour counselling available. Most of the groups dealing with this issue are completely stretched for resources. They are operating with volunteers. They are operating in places where they are not even sure if they have security. There are not even the services that should be there to help women exit the sex trade. The services are not even available if they want to make that decision.
To me, this debate is about looking for ways to reduce the harm of what is taking place in these communities. It is about understanding what the impact of the law has been. It is about recognizing that we do have contradictions in the way we view prostitution, whether it is on street or off street. It is about having an honest and frank debate about what we can do to look at law reform and to look what other countries have done. For example, one of the really dangerous situations that the Criminal Code contributes to is that because communicating for the purposes of soliciting is an offence, it means women are put at greater risk because they are getting into a car, the door gets locked, they are driven away and that is where the transaction takes place. So even the communicating law is a situation that is creating a great hazard for people involved in the sex trade. Again, there is some information about this, but it has never been evaluated in a way that allows for a debate and a policy change to be considered.
I very much look forward to the debate that will take place today and I hope that the government representative who will be speaking will recognize that there is a problem. I am sure everybody agrees, but I think we have to focus on what it is that we are going to do to resolve that problem. I really think we would do a disservice to this issue if we were to continue with task force reports that are behind closed doors and at a bureaucratic level. I really believe that this should be an issue that involves members of the House, through a committee. I very much hope that the government would concur with that position and at least allow that debate to happen without prejudging the outcome.
Mr. Speaker, I thank you for the opportunity to speak at the opening of this debate and I look forward to comments from my colleagues.
