Stop enforcing sex work laws during COVID-19, Amnesty, sex worker advocates say

Canada's sex work laws are creating undue harm and contribute to human rights violations during COVID-19, sex workers and human rights advocates say, which is why they're now pushing Ottawa to stop enforcing them.

Amnesty International Canada has joined a number of rights and sex work advocates in a lobby effort asking federal Justice Minister David Lametti for a moratorium on prostitution laws.

"We need to make sure the existing laws on the books aren't enforced," said Jackie Hansen, women's rights campaigner for Amnesty International Canada.

"Government has put them in a position where they won't provide them income supports and yet will criminalize them if they work. That just needs to stop."

They say decriminalizing sex work would help ease the burden workers have faced by taking away police surveillance of their work and their lives.

"Because sex work is not recognized as work, the labour standards and protocols that other industries are receiving right now are not available to the sex industry," said Jenn Clamen, national co-ordinator of the Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform.

Businesses employing sex workers often operate in the shadows, so as they reopen they have no way to formalize and co-ordinate safety protocols or access supports for personal protective equipment, which are available to other industries, Clamen said.

Criminalization a barrier to income support

These groups have also been raising alarm about how the criminalization of sex workers has caused them to remain ineligible to receive emergency income supports, despite seeing their incomes disappear overnight when the pandemic hit.

There are provisions in Canada's prostitution laws that make workers immune from prosecution but not from arrest, which has led many workers to prefer to remain undocumented, their incomes undeclared.

This means they don't have the necessary paperwork to prove eligibility for the Canada Emergency Response Benefit — a program being administered through the federal tax system.

"Criminalization is a direct barrier for accessing CERB and is a direct barrier for sex workers accessing other legal and social, medical supports in the community," said Jelena Vermilion, executive director of Sex Workers' Action Program (SWAP) Hamilton.

Vermilion, who is also a sex worker, said organizations like hers have been raising money through grassroots campaigns to provide aid to those who are struggling. But despite the relative success of some of these local initiatives, this aid has only been able to offer $50 or $100 gift cards and cash transfers to workers.

"That doesn't pay rent at the end of the day," she said.

"A lot of us are not surviving. It's really pushing people who don't have the option to access CERB into destitution, into further entrenched poverty. It's going to cause people who were already on the margins, just surviving, to be ruined."

Workers not captured by existing federal funding

The federal government has shovelled out millions in COVID-19 aid to shelters, sexual assault centres and a number of organizations that serve women and marginalized groups, including a $350-million investment to support charities and non-profit organizations serving vulnerable populations.

Clamen said these funds, while necessary, are not providing the help sex workers need.

Middle-class Canadians who lost their jobs are getting access to income supports, but sex workers are being helped by charities giving out gift cards, she said.

"The $100 grocery cards that dictate where sex workers or people who don't have income should shop or get their groceries is an extremely paternalistic response to people who actually need income supports," Clamen said.

"The money needs to go into the hands of people."

Federal prostitution law up for review this year

While they continue to push for more direct financial aid, Amnesty International Canada, the Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform and other rights advocates say halting the enforcement of the laws that criminalize their lives would do much more.

"This is about the human rights of sex workers. When you are just furthering marginalization and you are furthering inequality, this is not where we want to be," Hansen said.

"In a pandemic, it can't be a response that leads to some groups being disproportionately marginalized and impacted because government finds it hard to figure out how to handle this issue."

In a statement Friday, Lametti's office said officials are "aware of the specific concerns" that sex workers and advocates have highlighted but offered no comment on whether it is considering this legal move.

"We continue to engage with individuals and groups affected by the former Bill C-36," the statement said, referring to the federal prostitution law brought in under the Conservative government of former prime minister Stephen Harper.

That law is up for its mandatory five-year review this year, which Lametti's office said will provide "an appropriate forum for parliamentarians to examine the full range of effects that this legislation has had since its coming into force."