Vancouver- The federal government has effectively dashed the hopes of some MPs that it will decriminalize prostitution and allow Vancouver “sex-trade workers” to open a brothel to coincide with the 2010 Winter Olympics, the Ottawa Citizen reported.
“We are not in the business of legalizing brothels, and we have no intention of changing any of the laws relating to prostitution in this country,” Justice Minister Rob Nicholson told the Commons status of women committee.
A majority on the committee had urged the government to amend the Criminal Code so that only those who exploit or buy sex from prostitutes would face prosecution. But Nicholson refused.
“We have laws with respect to street soliciting or soliciting in public places that criminalizes completely the activity – the individual that is trying to purchase that service and the individual that is offering it,” he said. “And [those] will continue to be the laws of this country.”
“[Nicholson] doesn’t get it,” said Liberal MP Maria Minna. “The men don’t get charged. Who gets the record and gets thrown in the clink? It’s the woman. She’s the victim.”
A coalition of female, male and transgendered prostitutes had hoped to be granted an exemption to the law so they could set up several “co-op” brothels. They claimed this would create a safer environment for sex-trade workers, citing as a precedent the exemption from Health Canada that allows a supervised drug injection site to operate in Vancouver.
But as Montreal Gazette columnist Janet Bagnall noted, the Aboriginal Women’s Action Network in B.C. is concerned that legalizing brothels would only increase the number of prostitutes.
“With an estimated 90 per cent of prostitutes having been forced into the sex trade, [that] is not a good idea,” wrote Bagnall. “Research shows that the vast majority of prostitutes have been trafficked or been sexually victimized in their homes or suffer from drug addiction.”
Vancouver Courier columnist Mark Hasiuk also suspects that the time for this idea has come – and gone. “Legalized brothels have been tried before in Europe, but the zeitgeist seems to be changing. . . . Even Europe’s most liberal governments have decided that prostitution is not a solution to the problem – prostitution is the problem,” he wrote.