Photo: The Canadian Press

Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada David Lametti speaks with the media in Ottawa, Tuesday, January 28, 2020. 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. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

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," says 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.

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, says 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."