By James Sinclair
Local community groups have mixed reactions towards a controversial bill that would allow municipalities to licence brothels.
Ottawa Centre MP Mac Harb, who tabled the private members bill in June, says legalizing prostitution in licenced brothels will get prostitutes off the streets and help fight the drug problem that is a big part of the sex trade.
Many local community groups, however, don’t think licenced brothels are the solution.
“Where you have legalized brothels you still have a street prostitution problem,” says Cheryl Parrot, chair of the security committee at the Hintonburg Community Association and an organizer at a rehabilitation school for Johns, the clients of prostitution.
“Street prostitution tends to be a lower price, more anonymous, and many of the prostitutes who work it probably could not pass the health test required in a legalized brothel,” she says.
Regional Police Supt. Knowlton Roberts, who has worked with the John School, says legalized brothels, which have been tried in other areas of North America, tend to go out of business because they can’t compete with drug-addicted prostitutes who charge less on the street.
“On the fringe of prostitution areas that are legalized there will always be a submarket . . . and clients tend to go towards the street level prostitution,” he says.
There is no single solution to the problem of prostitution, says Harb, but it is necessary at least to give municipalities the option to regulate it.
The reaction to his bill has been mostly positive, he says.
The Dalhousie Community Association is one group that has supported legalizing prostitution. Six years ago the association sent a letter to Harb and Allan Rock, then minister of justice, asking them to allow municipalities to legislate the sex trade.
“It would provide a better alternative to street prostitution and escort services,” says Ida Henderson, vice-president of the association. Street prostitution would not disappear but it would diminish, she says.
“As a customer, what are you looking for, something safer that is licenced or a cheap cup of poison?”
City Coun. Elisabeth Arnold says licenced brothels won’t work because no one will want them in their communities.
“Communities have said they don’t want strip clubs in their residential neighbourhoods, I don’t think they’re going to be saying they want brothels in their residential neighbourhoods,” she says.
“And I haven’t met any business people in my ward saying that they’d like to have this use in their business district.”