The Final Countdown: 6 days left until Election Day in Alberta
Staying above the fray of Alberta’s wild 2015 election campaign, Edmonton Mayor Don Iveson argued in his annual State of the City Address that which ever political party forms the…
prostitution
Harper’s Prostitution Bill C-36 ‘Offends’ Charter: Legal Experts
Over 200 legal experts from across Canada recently wrote to Prime Minister Stephen Harper to protest Bill C-36, the Conservatives new prostitution law. The post Harper’s Prostitution Bill C-36 ‘Offends’…
Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – PressProgress highlights how the Cons’ stay in office has been marked by temporary rather than permanent jobs, while Kaylie Tiessen writes that precarious…
Peter MacKay Vows to Eradicate the Penguin Population
When Captain Robert Scott visited the Antartic in the early 1900s, his crew was shocked when they witnessed the “depraved” sexual conduct of the penguin population. Scott’s medical officer, George…
Alberta Tory MLA arrested in U.S. prostitution sting? Not a problem, apparently…
Fort McMurray-Wood Buffalo Tory MLA Mike Allen: Excited to be back in the Tory caucus. (Dave Cournoyer photo, used with permission.) Say what you like about the many flaws of…
Tories invite Mike Allen back in, Wildrose show Joe Anglin the door
TweetProgressive Conservative MLAs have voted to extend an invitation to Fort McMurray-Wood Buffalo MLA Mike Allen to rejoin their caucus. Mr. Allen, a relatively popular first-term politician in his constituency,…
Bill C-36 Analysis In Detail Part 3: Advertising
The government is playing some very subtle games with the language in C-36. In some respects, the language is ridiculously broad (e.g. the undefined nature of “sexual services”), in other…
Bill C-36 Analysis In Detail Part 2
Bill C-36 casts a much wider net than I had first thought. Traditionally, when a term is being used to define an offence, a definition of that term is inserted…
Canada’s Sex Workers Dismayed by Harper’s New Prostitution Law
“Frankly, this response is heartbreaking.” – Emily Symons by: POWER | Press Release | June 4, 2014 (OTTAWA) – Today, members of POWER and other sex workers and allies across…
Legislating morality—the new prostitution law
Ah, yet another step backward into a failed past. I refer, of course, to our favourite government’s new Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act, a piece of legislation that…
Bill C-36: Analysis In Detail – Part I
The biggest pieces of Bill C-36 are well described elsewhere in the media, and there isn’t any real surprise to it. The Harper Government has more or less just resurrected…
The Con Hookers and the War on the Supreme Court
I suppose it's only fitting that it should be Peter MacKay, the one who pimped the Progressive Conservative party to Stephen Harper and his Reform cowboys, who should make the…
Apparently MacKay Missed The Point …
When the Supreme Court of Canada struck down Canada’s prostitution laws last year, it did so on the basis that the existing laws placed sex workers in unreasonably dangerous situations.…
Hookers to be part of Italy’s GDP
Italy’s National Institute of Statistics recently announced that next year it will start including activities such as prostitution and illegal drug sales in the country’s Gross Domestic Product. And why…
Prostitution—keeping the state out of our bedrooms
“There’s no place for the state,” a prime minister once said, “in the bedrooms of the nation.” I hope Justice Minister Peter MacKay and his colleagues keep that sage advice…
No, Yaakov Roth, The Supreme Court of Canada Is Not Overstepping Its Boundaries
I see the Harper PMO must have found another muppet to write opinion pieces for them. In the National Post, we find Yaakov Roth expounding on the “problems” he has…
2014: Year in Preview
We don’t know what will make headlines in 2014. After all, most political predictions are about as accurate as a Forum poll. So I won’t try to guess how 2014…
Standby On The Fainting Couches …
This morning, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down our countries archaic laws on prostitution. Predictably, the Con$ who report to PMSH are wagging their fingers at the Supreme Court:…
Prostitution is like abortion: you can’t stop it
With the Supreme Court striking down Canada’s prostitution laws, they have forced the issue into the public sphere. Within a year, Parliament has to decide to pass new laws regarding…