The government should guarantee my company’s profit: Morning File, Monday, May 30, 2016

Last fall, in a police sting dubbed “John Be Gone,” two female police officers posed as sex workers on downtown Sydney streets in order to lure prospective johns, and sure enough, 27 men were charged. Today, one of those men is challenging the charge in court. Parker Donham notes that:

[Lawyer TJ] McKeough argues the alleged crimes would not have occurred but for the actions of police.

Trials for the accused men became something of a moot point after CBRM Police Chief Peter McIsaac took it upon himself to release their names, and the Cape Breton Post published them. McIsaac underscored this act of public shaming for the men and their families with a series of comments about the evils of prostitution.

Lawyer McKeough will ask to have the charges against his client thrown out on grounds of abuse of process.

Many Sydney residents found the police behaviour repugnant, but entrapment is narrowly defined in Canada, so it should make for an interesting hearing.

Donham will be live-blogging today’s hearing via his Twitter account, @kempthead.

As I wrote in February:

Sex work is legal in Canada, so the criminalization of “communication” strikes me as silly, but I’ll leave it for legal experts to debate the entrapment issues.

The bigger point, however, is that sting operations, whether targeted at sex workers or johns, are bad public policy.

Very often, these women and girls grew up in abusive households. “The attitude was children naturally suck on things,” one woman told me, as she went on to explain the horrific extent of familial sexual exploitation of two generations of girls. “We weren’t people; we were objects.”

I’ve learned of girls whose parents introduced them to drugs as a controlling mechanism in order to pimp them out. I’ve found girls who apparently never went to school at all.

The lives of these women and girls are unimaginable to most of us. Physical and sexual abuse are a constant. They don’t have the skills to navigate away from the streets. They don’t have the education, money, or connections to leave their world. Often, their families are a hindrance, not a help.

In Part Five of Dead Wrong, I’ll be detailing the lives of several teenage sex workers in Halifax. Readers will meet their pimps and their customers. We’ll learn of drug addiction, illiteracy, and hopelessness.

One thing I’ve learned is that broader society is of no help to them. We either neglect and ignore the marginalized women and girls doing sex work, or we consider them a nuisance. We seem not to care much when they are attacked and murdered.

We should be discussing issues of sex, class, education, and poverty, and how we can provide people on the margins of society the basic supports they need. But these issues run very deep and threaten too many sacred cows, so we avoid addressing them.

The CBC illustration for the article about sex work.

Instead of addressing poverty, we send female cops out to entrap the old man down the street, and we chuckle over the resulting titillating copy in the media. (I don’t blame CBC reporter Joan Weeks for it, but the CBC homepage link to her article on the Sydney busts is illustrated by a photo of a woman seen only from the crotch down.)

The women and girls are surviving, as best they can. And sex work is part of that survival strategy.

When we crack down on street prostitution, we’re pushing these women and girls even further to the margins, even more into the shadows. They’ll now meet potential clients in sketchier locations, away from the downtown street lights, away from passersby who might help a fleeing or injured woman, away from the support the sex workers can give each other on the stroll.

We need to have adult conversations about decriminalization and/or legalization of sex work, and how we would go about that to best protect sex workers. I certainly can’t provide the answers. I suggest we listen to the sex workers themselves, and we ask them how to proceed.

In the meanwhile, the Cape Breton crackdown on johns might’ve pleased a few business owners and fed the gossip mill, but it did nothing at all to help the women and girls who work the street. On the contrary, it put them in increased danger.

6. Teenager killed on Highway 7

An RCMP release:

At 9:45 p.m. yesterday, Sheet Harbour RCMP and EHS responded to a report of a collision on Highway 7.

Preliminary investigation determined that an eastbound sedan pulled out to pass another vehicle in a passing lane. There was an oncoming vehicle in that lane. As the driver attempted to switch lanes to avoid a collision, the sedan left the roadway.

The sole occupant of the vehicle, a 17 year-old man from Moser River, died at the scene as a result of his injuries.

Godfrey pointed to federal statistics showing government advertising in newspapers was halved, while online advertising nearly doubled, between 2010 and 2015. The bulk of the money went to foreign-owned behemoths like Google and Facebook, which produce no original Canadian news content.

Although framed by a weak argument for “government accountability,” the Amherst News similarly wants to be compensated for printing news about emergency room closures:

There has been a steady flow of press releases coming from the Nova Scotia Health Authority advising of ER closures at All Saints and other local hospitals. The reason: physician shortages.

There’s no doubt the public has a right to be informed if no physician is available, but the underlining question is at who’s cost? The publicly funded provincial health authority relies on local media to advertise their message on an all too regular basis for free.

When the Nova Scotia Health Authority announced what it would cost to do business it tabled a $1.8 billion budget – $96.8 million of that in administration costs, $285 million for operation, $540 million for inpatient services, $336 million for therapeutic service, $112 million for acute care, and another $269 million for ambulatory care.

Nowhere in the budget was a single cent for advertising ER closures at rural hospitals. 

This might be less ironic were newspapers not regularly simply re-writing government press releases, slapping a reporter’s byline on them, and calling it “news.”

It’s an interesting argument that the government should guarantee a business’s profit, but as the Halifax Examiner doesn’t take a penny of advertising from governments or anyone else, I’m not at all sympathetic.

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