Justice committee  Yes, absolutely. I had a chance to review in great detail the report that we've been talking about, the statistics. It's very clear to me looking at those statistics that they reflect the reality of what we see, that there's actually a decrease in sex workers reporting violence,

Justice committee  We don't have a lot of confidence in this process because it's not conducive to actually looking at evidence and data. Just from my brief testimony here, I've been told that I'm passionate about five times, which is code for, “Okay, we get it. You're an angry sex worker with emot

Justice committee  The most marginalized women suffer the most consequences. They also have the most adversarial relationship with the government and they're over‑represented in prison. In Quebec, about 80% of women incarcerated in a provincial institution have sex work experience. They're often i

Justice committee  The first step must be decriminalization. In a situation where the police officers are mandated to eliminate the sex industry and are told by the Parliament of Canada that all sex work is a type of exploitation, there isn't any room to build anything positive with the police. On

Justice committee  Every time I bring up indigenous women, you cut me off.

Justice committee  That would be nice, yes. I've been cut off every time I've tried to get to indigenous women, and I think it's just very important to really acknowledge that indigenous women make up a huge percentage of the women we reach at Stella. They are the women we see the most in prison,

Justice committee  In our view, decriminalization is better than legalization. Legalization creates a very strict little framework, where sex work is legal. It continues to ensure that anyone who doesn't fit into that framework is considered a criminal. Our main goal is obviously to protect the m

Justice committee  Yes, absolutely. When it comes to work exploitation, the concept of exploitation in a workplace context is not something that usually belongs in the Criminal Code. It's something that belongs in employment standards, where we as a society have given ourselves recourse in case of

Justice committee  Yes, of course. It should be noted that protection isn't necessarily the main goal. We can't eliminate sex work and protect people engaged in prostitution at the same time. These two goals contradict each other. We find that criminalization complicates all stages of sex work in

Justice committee  Whether or not it's working is a difficult question. We highly disagree with one of the main objectives of the law. One of the objectives of this law is to send a strong message that as Canadians we have a social project to eradicate sex workers, that we hate sex workers so much

Justice committee  It's very important to first point out that the data regarding the justice system is very incomplete, because most sex workers are not in those files. When we are caught up in a criminal investigation, we will not disclose facts about ourselves if we don't have to, so that is ver

Justice committee  I'll just finish this one point. Women who are the most at risk of police repression or of unwanted contact with police are the women who are the most at risk of going missing or being murdered. We have examples here in Montreal of sex workers who have gone missing, who have be

Justice committee  Hi. I'm Sandra Wesley. I'm the executive director of Stella, l'amie de Maimie, an organization by and for sex workers based in Montreal. I know Jen Clamen from the Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform was supposed to speak, so I had expected that she was going to maybe tel

Information & Ethics committee  I'll start. We thought it was very strange that this committee, which is supposed to be talking about privacy and ethics, was looking at this. This stems from the New York Times article and a very ideological campaign that has nothing to do with it. So all kinds of issues are be

Information & Ethics committee  There is one thing to remember: the reason we are here today, the origin of this whole debate, is the desire of some people to eradicate the whole pornography industry, sex education, the rights of gay people, and the rights of trans people. It is the efforts of these people that