Hearings began this week at the Ontario Superior Court in Toronto on a challenge to Canada’s sex work-specific criminal offences because they violate sex workers’ constitutional rights to security, personal and sexual autonomy, life, liberty, free expression, association, and equality.

In 2013, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in Canada v. Bedford that three criminal prohibitions on prostitution were unconstitutional because they caused harm to sex workers and contravened sex workers’ rights to liberty and security.

Instead of recognizing sex workers’ rights and well-being by decriminalizing sex work, the federal government created a set of criminal laws called the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act (PCEPA) that reproduce those same harms.

PCEPA criminalizes communicating to sell sexual services in public, communicating to purchase sexual services in any context, facilitating or receiving a benefit related to the purchase of someone else’s sexual services, and advertising sexual services.

Sex workers are criminalized, stigmatized and discriminated against under PCEPA because many sex workers are:

• Forced into isolation, exposed to the risk of eviction and unable to access safe indoor workplaces; Prevented from meaningfully communicating with clients to access information related to their health, safety, and ability to refuse or consent to sex
• Prevented from accessing health, social, and legal services
• Subject to unwanted and unsolicited police presence in their lives – particularly for Black, Indigenous, migrant and trans sex workers, and sex workers who use drugs, who are regularly profiled and targeted.

Harms of PCEPA on sex workers go well beyond arrest. Sex workers face risk child apprehension, loss of life and life supports, detention and deportation, experience targeted violence, lack of access to health, legal, and social sercices experience human rights abuses as sex workers try to avoid detection by law enforcement, live and work in precarious and unsafe conditions, and do not seek help or report crimes against them.

In March 2021, The Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform – an Alliance of 25 sex worker rights groups across the country, mainly led by sex workers – along with 6 individual applicants, filed a notice to challenge Canada’s sex work-specific criminal offences.

source: media release