any degree of safety in their respective workplaces.

From criminalizing living off the avails of prostitution (which, for example, limits the ability to lawfully hire bodyguards), to the prohibition of solicitation in public (which pushes sex work into the dark and dangerous corridors of the nation’s cities), the laws formerly on the books made sex work and sex workers fundamentally vulnerable and unsafe. Ultimately, the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) decided that the negative effects of the laws were grossly disproportionate to the aim of the laws. On Dec. 20, 2013, the SCC struck down all three prostitution-related offences in the criminal code: living off the avails of prostitution, soliciting in public, and keeping a brothel.

Despite the SCC ruling, the Harper Conservatives have ignored this decision and enacted newof private property which denies them, and all workers, a fair share of the collectively produced wealth of society, by the moral hypocrisy of the ruling class who stigmatize and scapegoat sex workers, and who, while constantly caught up in their own scandals, perpetuate the economic and social conditions that drive many women to sex work in the first place.

In this context, the “moral” argument that sex work should immediately be abolished is sanctimonious nonsense and only further stigmatizes some of society’s most marginalized women. However, the argument that sex work is a liberatory choice and should therefore be completely normalized in the current society is also severely flawed. There can be no possibility of abolishing sex work, or of sex work being a real “choice”, until women