Constitutionally Challenging Prostitution Policy and Laws in Canada: Option and Considerations for Adopting a New Policy and Legal Framework
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In October 2012, the Supreme Court of Canada announced it will hear the case, Bedford v. Canada, challenging the constitutionality of the country’s main laws controlling prostitution. It remains to be seen whether the courts will uphold Canada’s prostitution provisions under the Criminal Code or deem them unconstitutional due to violations of Charter rights. If the Supreme Court strikes down the provisions, both Canada's policy and legal approach towards the controversial sex industry will be invalidated, leaving a legislative gap regarding prostitution. In response, lawmakers must resolve this policy and legal vacuum by adopting a new framework to address sex work. This report addresses the potential policy and legal gap regarding prostitution that may develop, presenting and evaluating alternative options available for implementation, and discussing potential issues associated with the implementation of each approach in the Canadian context. The design of the report is aimed at offering a comprehensive and comparable overview of a number of policy and legal models on prostitution enacted in other jurisdictions and to help Canadian legislatures consider options for prostitution policy and law based both on the successes and failures of each approach in other jurisdictions, and relevant considerations specific to the Canadian context, such as issues of jurisdiction and constitutionality. It is concluded that there is no perfect policy and legal model for adoption in Canada, with each approach suffering from setbacks when implemented in other jurisdictions and requiring a number of considerations for implementation in Canadian jurisdictions. Given the inconclusiveness of what alternate policy and legal model is ideal for Canada, a number of "nextstep" recommendations are made to guide and structure the debate over and process for selecting a model to meet Canada's need to address the potential policy and legal gap on prostitution.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.024 | 0.035 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.037 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.024 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".