Justice committee  Thank you. I apologize if my Internet cuts out. I'm on my cellular data, so it's kind of shaky. I think my brief draws out some really good assumptions as to how the law treats indigenous women in particular. It makes assumptions about who we are and about what we do. When I

Justice committee  Yes, the one example that I gave to your co-committee member was when I was stabbed at work. I was a stripper and I was stabbed at work by another stripper. I couldn't call the police because I knew that the other stripper was a single mother. I knew that if I called the police,

Justice committee  No, I was just commenting on that. The DOJ in its summary cites what this bill targets. The law, in all of these discussions we're having here today, presumes to target prostitution, which is full-service sex work. That would only include sort of indoor or outdoor street-based s

Justice committee  That's a really good example. I'll share a story from law school. I was sitting in law school in constitutional litigation class and working on a theoretical challenge to Bill C-36, PCEPA, which we're here on today. We were building our fact pattern, and I remember my constitut

Justice committee  I think there is disagreement about how [Technical difficulty—Editor]

Justice committee  What I think was important in the New Zealand model was that they heard directly from sex workers. I think in the implementation of PCEPA that has been horribly missed. We have to, as I said, return to Bedford. What does it say? What does it tell Parliament it can and cannot do

Justice committee  I understand. I'm not giving a lawyer opinion. I think it's very important that we turn our mind to what Bedford says, because I think we're moving away from that each time we go to the data, each time we go to the ancillary benefits. I think that's the harm, and we're moving

Justice committee  I'm sorry. Can you just clarify the question?

Justice committee  A takeaway message is I think with a quick personal story. I was stabbed at work, as a stripper. I couldn't turn to the victims compensation board, which no longer exists in Ontario. It's been reformatted by Premier Ford. They said that if you were engaged in a criminal activity

Justice committee  Can you just rephrase your question? I didn't get a question out of that.

Justice committee  Yes, and I thank my co-panellist Ms. Smith for sharing her story. I understand that it takes a lot of strength to do that. I'd like to turn the attention to my brief, in which I outlined that whether we're talking about decriminalization or legalization, we're talking about regu

Justice committee  Yes, that is correct. I don't think there will be any gaps, because, as Ms. Davis said earlier, the police need the tools to rely on the other provisions that are there in the code. She didn't say that word for word, but she alluded to it in that way.

Justice committee  We have to remember that—I said this in 2014—choice is such a complicated topic. People make different choices every single day for many reasons, and the contexts in which those choices are made vary. Today, we have laws that.... I don't think they help make the prosecution of hu

Justice committee  We have to remember that New Zealand is a unitary state. In Canada, we have a blessing and a curse, where we have federal, provincial, regional, municipal and first nations.... You have a lot of different contexts for how sex work may look in different regions. How it looks in To

Justice committee  Yes, that is correct. My brief, which I filed on Wednesday evening, I think draws attention to sort of the soup of regulations that target the sex trade, in terms of municipal regulations, what's unregulated, what's not regulated, what's legalized and what's not legalized. I th