Should the City of Toronto Partner with Strip Clubs to Open Brothels?

Could this iconic Toronto strip club soon include a municipally sanctioned brothel? Photo via Flickr user Ben Watts

Technically, prostitution has never been illegal in Canada, but up until recently the majority of activities surrounding the sex trade were. Among other things, prostitutes were prohibited from offering their services in “a fixed indoor location,” a.k.a. a brothel. When Terri-Jean Bedford, Amy Lebovitch, and Valerie Scott challenged this law and two others in front of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, all three statutes were deemed to be unconstitutional. It was a massive step in changing the conditions surrounding sex work, and it opened the door to a multitude of new possibilities for the industry.

This ruling also introduces a host of new questions, particularly when it comes to opening brothels. For example, where do we put these all-of-a-sudden-legal sex parlors? And who's allowed to run them? Municipal councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, for one, supports a plan that would let Toronto strip club owners tack on brothels to their establishments.

Now, it's hard to take Mammoliti, who is one of Rob Ford's few supporters in City Hall, seriously in the slightest—it seems, however, that he’s thought about a brothel partnership with the city long and hard (pun intended). Way back in 2011, Mammoliti saw the push for legalized prostitution as an opportunity waiting to be seized. He apparently thought, This looks like a neat way for the city to make money and proposed a plan for an official red light district. Unfortunately, Mammoliti’s idea was tragically flawed. He wanted to confine legal brothels to Toronto Island, which is already home to a nude beach, an amusement park, an art center, and a small community of hippie-ish folk. No one wanted to add sex work to that mix, so the initiative was canned.

Fast forward to December 2013, when the highest court of Canada confirmed the invalidation of the laws as they were originally formulated and gave legislators a year to come up with new, more constitutional rules. That's when the Adult Entertainment Association (AEA) of Canada, a trade group, figured it would be a good time to propose placing brothels in the hands of experienced and qualified establishments, i.e. strip clubs. As AEA director Tim Lambrinos explained, the idea isn’t to change the demand and turn strip clubs into brothels. The “enhanced experience” would take place in a separate part of the building, accessible through a different door. Also, the exotic dancers would not be working as sex workers. In essence, the AEA is looking toward increasingly regulating prostitution by taking the women off the street and allowing them to work in a supervised environment. The advantage of relying on established strip clubs, according to Lambrinos, is that they are already accustomed to working with law enforcement and health agencies to comply with existing regulations.

Despite the AEA's intentions, North American social norms and the stigma surrounding prostitution remain—plus, city-endorsed brothels likely appear just plain wrong to most of the city's conservative voters. Even so, Mammoliti is sticking his neck out for brothels. He's told the media it's “worth our while listening to [strip club operators]” and attended a meeting of the AEA earlier this month, during which a partnership between the city and the clubs to establish the brothels was formally pitched. According to a source who was at the meeting, he agreed with the concept in principle, provided that a comprehensive study paid for by the AEA be conducted prior to implementing a pilot project. (The study hasn't begun yet, but results are expected back in July.) That pilot project would be a yearlong trial period during which the mechanisms deemed acceptable by the study would be implemented. Meanwhile, the infamous Bunny Ranch brothel in Las Vegas has already announced its intention to open up a Toronto branch.

A partnership between the strip clubs and the city would likely have serious repercussions on the sex industry and sex workers’ conditions, that’s a given. What isn’t exactly clear is whether the potential benefits would trump the risk of organized exploitation on the part of these club owners. Yes, the increased regulation that would result from a partnership between the city and the AEA could lead to standardized, safer practices in sex work. It could also severely limit the workers’ control of their activities and cripple their earnings.

If you ask Valerie Scott, one of the three plaintiffs in the landmark Supreme Court case and legal coordinator of the Sex Professionals of Canada, handing over exclusive rights to strip club owners for operating legal brothels is a terrible idea. To her knowledge, this “group of guys” have not consulted sex workers about their model for legal brothels. In her opinion, the licensing fees for brothels will probably cost as much as those for erotic massage parlors (around $11,000), which would be unaffordable to the average Canadian sex worker, who earns about $40,000 a year. That would give club owners virtually unlimited power over the women—if they were being underpaid or mistreated, they'd have little recourse other than finding employment at another legal brothel, where they might run into the same problems, or illegally freelancing. In the worst-case scenario, Toronto's brothel licenses would allow the holders to act like pimps with the law on their side. Scott suggests that a more independent model, where workers create their own safe spaces, is a better solution.

Although Mammoliti can be applauded for going against the prohibitionist consensus most conservatives embrace, given that no sex workers are being consulted about this potential partnership, his motives are clearly not as FTG (for the girls) as they may initially seem. The issue is complicated, a lot is at stake for the future of sex workers, and clearly there's a battle in the city for control of its forthcoming model of legalized prostitution.

@martcte