This article was last updated on April 16, 2022
Canada: 
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The federal government plans to table its new prostitution legislation today, which are primarily prompted by a December Supreme Court decision that found three provisions of previous Canada’s sex work laws unconstitutional. According to the previous laws, prostitution itself was legal but everything else related to it, including keeping a brothel, living on the avails of prostitution, and street soliciting were illegal.
In a landmark decision by the Supreme Court, it upheld the sex workers’ human rights to work and health by acknowledging how those criminal provisions contributed to unsafe working conditions. Thereafter, the government was granted a year to replace the unconstitutional laws, out of which the majority time was spent conducting in-person meetings and online consultations that one former sex worker called “ridiculous.” An avid current rights advocate and one of the applicants in the landmark Bedford ruling that struck down the prostitution-related prohibitions, Valerie Scott, alleged that “people who’ve never been in sex work, people who don’t know anything about it—they primarily are the people who responded.”
However, Justice Minister Peter MacKay claims that he also consulted specific sex worker groups, though he refusing to identify the group due to reasons of confidentiality. According to MacKay, the new legislation is aimed to protect the vulnerable. He explained that “we believe that this legislation is the proper response, it’s the measured response after having consulted broadly,” adding that “we feel that this will go to the heart of protecting vulnerable individuals.”
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