The Powers Premiers Have

Yesterday I posted how the fight for access to abortion is the same fight as that of the fight for safety of sex workers. All attacks on abortion access and all attacks on sex work come from the same place: controlling, paternalistic men (and women who adore them) who see women’s sexuality as a dangerous threat to their dominance. Just like with their anti-abortion kin, C-36 supporters believe women’s bodies are pieces of property to be controlled by the government, lest those women get foolish ideas to commit acts of unrepentant harlotry.

I used a real life situation as an example: although the Supreme Court decided in 1988 denying access to abortion was a sexist prohibition, New Brunswick wrote their own regulations that were simply a re-write of the struck-down federal laws. For over 25 years, New Brunswick was illegally attacking a woman’s right to reproductive choice and getting away with it. It was being fought in the courts, but court challenges cost time and money, and not to mention a public desire for justice – a small group of activists in a socially conservative province fighting abortion were never bumped to the top of the docket.

Suddenly, everything changed. The new Premier of New Brunswick, a delicious looking man named Brian Gallant, announced this illegal practice ends as of January 1^st.

Boom. After 25 years of a province deliberately targeting women with restrictions already proven unconstitutional, they would end. Just like that. He didn’t wave a magic wand or snap his fingers – that would have taken up more time than his simple announcement.

25 years. Think about that. That’s more than the amount of time it takes for someone to get pregnant, be denied an abortion, have their child grow up and be denied an abortion herself.

25 years of women forced to go out of province for the procedure. 25 years of having to scrape together money for a private clinic. A quarter of a century of a deliberate and unrelenting attack on women’s bodies and health, and it’s all coming to an end in a little over a month.

This is the power Premiers of provinces have. While Gallant has more lee-way in this particular situation than someone like Kathleen Wynne with C-36 (it was a provincial law and not a federal one Gallant’s government is no longer enforcing), like him all she has to do is with one proclamation cause a significant change. All she has to do is refer C-36 to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice and instruct Ontario Crown Prosecutors to not lay charges. People outside of Ontario will still be affected by C-36 (unless their Premiers do the same), but she can help push everything in the right direction to the inevitable Supreme Court of Canada fight.

As wonderful as the end of this attack is, each day of those 25 years was a travesty. Every one of those days told a story of a broken life. It took 25 years for women in New Brunswick to have the same rights as women throughout the rest of Canada; as sex workers, we don’t want to wait the same amount of time to reclaim ours.

Sex work and Abortion: It’s the same fight

In 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down Canada’s anti-abortion laws as unconstitutional. The court ruled these laws put women’s lives in danger and had no place in a free society that valued human life. (Sounds a lot like Bedford, doesn’t it?)

Birth control is a very important part of a sex worker’s life. Women sex workers, like women in general, would like to prefer to choose when to have children, if at all.

However, sometimes condoms break. Sometimes IUDs fail. Sometimes women are raped. Access to abortion was considered by the Court a medical necessity, and denial to that access was a sexist attack on all women.

So in 1988 when those laws fell, sex workers were amongst the ones celebrating. When the then-governing Conservatives tried to create a new law, women and political opposition parties were successful in stamping out any legislative attempt at controlling women’s bodies.

Today abortion is decriminalized; in spite of the whining from social conservatives the sky hasn’t fallen. Women are healthy and safe and babies are still being born. Under decriminalization, the only places in Canada today where abortion is unsafe are places like PEI (which doesn’t provide the procedure and refuses to admit doctors who will perform it) and New Brunswick (which enacted laws in violation of the Supreme Court decision, which 25 years later still remain) – in other words, places where the procedure is explicitly attacked.

It’s a given that a number of controlling, paternalistic men, along with women raised to respect them, would be against abortion. It’s also a given that those same controlling, paternalistic men, along with women raised to respect them, would be against sex work. Abortion and sex work are both issues of women’s bodily autonomy. No one or nothing has any right to a woman’s body without her consent, be it a zygote or a penis; paternalists instead believe women’s bodies are their property and can be used as they please.

But what’s strange about sex work is that there’s an odd breed of “feminist” who are against women’s bodily autonomy on this one specific issue. They’re referred to as “SWERFs” – Sex Work Exclusionary Radical Feminists – who believe the normal, healthy rules of consent and bodily autonomy do not apply when it comes to sex work.

I cannot comprehend the internal battle, if there even is one in the SWERF mind, between these two positions: they say they’re against paternalistic, social conservative men controlling women’s bodies, except for when it comes to the Swedish/Nordic Model or C-36; in those cases they’re completely on board with paternalistic, social conservative men controlling women’s bodies.  All of those methods of sex work criminalization turns sex workers’ bodies into 24-hour crime scenes, and declares their bodies as property of the state.

This, unfortunately for all women, has had a severe blowback. The SWERF-endorsed idea that sex work must be stamped out at all costs has had a devastating ripple effect against women worldwide. In the US, carrying condoms is used as evidence of sex work; so if you’re a woman who believes in safe sex don’t carry condoms, lest a cop, the SWERF’s hero, charges you for unrepentant harlotry. In Sweden, a place with a progressive reputation because of their social safety net, women who have had the nerve of not being born white can have their ethnicity used against them as evidence of sex work and can legally be refused business.

If you’re a Sex Work Exclusionary Radical Feminist you’re neither radical nor feminist – you are, frankly, tools of male social conservatives, no different than an anti-abortionist, taking the side of the oppressor in this centuries-old war of violence against all women.

Like preachy social conservative men, SWERFs would be boring if they weren’t so dangerous; both of them working together against women, as they did with C-36, they’ve brought a nightmare to Canada.

How to write a letter to your Premier

I just wanted to write a quick note to all those who have been passing around my letter to Kathleen Wynne. Thank you so, so very much. It was hard for me to write, and I felt emotionally exhausted after getting it out of my system. I needed to say it, and with the response I’ve been getting I’m glad I was able to inspire others to not just share the letter but to write their own.

I’ve been finding it linked to from places I hadn’t expected. Reporters and bloggers have been calling attention to it, and I’ve seen one blogger comment it’s about time she puts her pen to the paper and drops a note in support to the Premier as well. My fingers are crossed waiting for a response from Premier Wynne herself.

If you haven’t had time yet to write a letter asking your premier to refer the matter to your province’s Supreme Court, don’t worry, it’s not too late. Saturday, December 6^th is when the laws take effect, so I’d recommend you drop your letter into the mailbox no later than Monday, December 1^st, but she can do it at any time even after the 6th so go ahead anyway.

While I have been focusing on Kathleen Wynne because she’s my premier, this is something that can be done all across Canada. All you need are three things:

1. A letter. And a template already exists for you, courtesy Nikki Thomas and Naomi Sayers.
2. Your Premier’s Name and mailing address. Lo and behold, they’re all listed here!
3. The name of the Highest Court in your province that you are requesting the Premier refers the bill to for a judgement.

That last one is a little tricky, but I’ve gone ahead and made a list for you.

• ALBERTA: The Court of Queen’s Bench of Alberta
• BRITISH COLUMBIA: The Supreme Court of British Columbia
• MANITOBA: The Court of Queen’s Bench of Manitoba
• NEW BRUNSWICK: The Court of Queen’s Bench of New Brunswick
• NFLD & LABRADOR: The Supreme Court of Newfoundland and Labrador
• NORTHWEST TERR.: Supreme Court of the Northwest Territories
• NOVA SCOTIA: Nova Scotia Supreme Court
• NUNAVUT: Nunavut Court of Justice
• ONTARIO: Ontario Superior Court of Justice
• QUEBEC: Superior Court of Québec
• SASKATCHEWAN: The Court of Queen’s Bench for Saskatchewan
• YUKON: The Supreme Court of Yukon

This is something that takes a group effort, from sex workers to clients to allies all over. All it takes is 30 minutes, a stamp and a walk to a mailbox.