Thank you.

Maggie's Toronto Sex Workers Action Project is one of Canada's oldest funded sex worker justice organizations. For over 35 years, we've supported sex workers in Toronto through drop-in programming, harm reduction services, legal supports, food security efforts and more. Our work is in direct response to the harm caused by legislation like Bill C‑36.

The majority of sex workers we serve are from poor, working-class, racialized and indigenous communities, are members of the LGBTQ2S community and work as street-based sex workers. We've launched culturally specific services including the nation's first indigenous-led program for sex workers and emergency supports for Black sex workers who face compounded forms of violence as a result of criminalization.

Bill C‑36 claims to protect sex workers but in practice it isolates us from supports and facilitates violence. It recreates the impacts of the former unconstitutional laws for sex workers.

In 2017, one of our long-time community members, Alloura Wells, went missing. She was a 27-year-old Black and indigenous transwoman who attended our drop-in programming and navigated poverty, homelessness and police violence in the city. Following her disappearance, Alloura's father contacted Toronto Police Service to report her missing. He was told the case wasn't a high priority. Instead, police told her father that people like Alloura are transient, that they disappear and reappear all the time.

We formed our own search parties led by long-time activist Monica Forrester. Because of our public efforts demanding justice for Alloura Wells, five months after her initial disappearance, Toronto Police caved to the pressure and finally issued a missing persons report.

A short while later, a community member named Rebecca contacted Maggie's with news that she'd discovered a body in the Rosedale Valley and had actually contacted police months before. Police did not issue a news release when the body was reported and did not release details to the public, as they normally would. Rebecca followed up multiple times with Toronto Police to learn about developments, even reaching out to The 519 Church Street community centre, which promised to have staff investigate. The 519 did not follow up with Rebecca or our community.

After seeing media coverage about our search parties for Alloura, Rebecca reached out to us at Maggie's. Despite Alloura's father attempting to issue a missing persons report much earlier on, heavy news coverage of Alloura's disappearance and a community member notifying local service organizations, we had not been informed about this key development.

Only after following up with police about Rebecca's discovery did they agree to re-test DNA, and on November 23 they identified Alloura's body. They maintain that the cause of death can't be determined, but estimated that she died some time in July.

Toronto Police dismissed Alloura's disappearance because of her background in sex work, her race, gender identity and struggles with homelessness.

When laws like Bill C‑36 mark our communities as social problems to be eradicated, and instruct police to criminalize sex workers, our ability to access basic support and safety is undermined.

Indigenous women, Black and racialized women, transgender women, migrant women and people living through poverty are overrepresented in street-based sex work. The combination of the offences against communication and purchasing and the presence of police pushes street-based sex workers and their clients into remote areas. Working in poorly lit back alleys far from their homes, social services and their peers, the street-based sex workers we serve at Maggie's report increased difficulty screening their clients, detecting violent situations and negotiating consent.

Street-based sex workers at Maggie's have consistently disclosed about harassment from law enforcement and being forced to relocate around the city to avoid police. During our COVID-19 emergency support fund, one of the many indigenous sex workers who reached out for financial aid was a young Anishinabe street-based worker experiencing harassment and aggression from the police while struggling to work and survive at the height of the pandemic.

Bill C‑36 facilitates this violence and excludes us from solutions to improve our working conditions. One of the most devastating consequences of this law is that our communities are made responsible for the violence enacted on us. It's in this context that sex worker justice organizations like ours have been essential spaces to organize, support one another and continue fighting for decriminalization like the life and death issue that it is.

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