Status of Women committee  It is up from a previous question, but if there's time I would love to touch on this as well.

Status of Women committee  I was just going to say that saying to educate boys and young men to not pay for sex, etc., is oversimplifying. What we need to do is maybe the opposite of that. We need to make sure that youth understand consent, like Julia said, and understand that, yes, you're going to want different things and meet people who want different things, and in those moments you need to be able to express and understand consent.

Status of Women committee  Am I able to add something quickly? I just want to say that if you want to support and be inclusive of people who do sex work, you have to stop going to prohibitionist organizations who deny the existence of consensual sex work and conflate sex work with trafficking. I have heard two quotes from someone who's a prohibitionist; it eliminates the agency of people who do sex work and choose this work.

Status of Women committee  No, we have not received any funding from the federal government at all. The majority of our funding, especially for all of our operational expenses, even for some of our staff, who have very limited hours and whom we've been able to secure, has come from community donations from very small fundraisers: people who send five bucks through e-transfers or PayPal, or who drop something off.

Status of Women committee  Well, it's a very big question, because it's hard to think of anything that was well adapted to sex workers' needs. Right away, what comes to mind in Ontario is the closure of strip clubs within hours of notice. This was not based on any empirical data. There was no real evidence that there was an increase of COVID within strip clubs, while there was evidence that there was an increase within other types of commercial businesses, such as restaurants that were literally a few doors down from some of the clubs.

Status of Women committee  I guess I can take this one.

Status of Women committee  I just want to ask for some elaboration on what she means to “get out of” which...?

Status of Women committee  We'll connect this in the brief that we're sending. The Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform does have a comprehensive guide of next steps for people who do sex work. It's all there, and like Jenny said, it's something we're constantly going through and describing over and over again.

Status of Women committee  A lot of people ended up with nowhere to go for food, nowhere to go for diapers for their babies. A lot of people ended up feeling lonely, stigmatized, with nowhere to go for support or companionship. We recognized the great need in the London community and we committed ourselves as well as we could to pushing onward, because we chose to expand our support to other oppressed, impoverished, criminalized, dispossessed people.

Status of Women committee  Hi. My name is Julie Bauman, and I'm the executive director of SafeSpace London. I'm joined by my colleague Jenny Duffy, who is the board chair of Maggie's sex workers action project. Thank you for the invitation to speak with you today. SafeSpace London is our city's only organization centring the needs of sex workers and guided for the past 11 years by our mission to nurture a community of mutual care by, with and for sex workers.

Status of Women committee  All of this changed dramatically as soon as the COVID-19 pandemic hit in the spring of 2020. While social distancing can be an inconvenience to those who are more comfortably situated within our communities, for those who are isolated, abandoned and otherwise left for dead by both governmental bodies and social services, this kind of enforced distancing can be absolutely death-dealing.

Status of Women committee  It took us several weeks of sustained advocacy on behalf of our community members before the City of London finally installed a porta-potty by our address. However, porta-potties, as we all know, are not exactly as safe, clean or private.... The City chose this simply because it was the cheapest, which again demonstrates the ways in which people actually view those classified as priority populations.