The Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal is the daily newspaper of Northwestern Ontario.
THE WORLD’S oldest profession thrives on mankind’s most basic instinct, which means prostitution is never going away. It’s certainly popular in Thunder Bay’s two downtown cores where the sex trade flourishes.
McKellar ward Coun. Paul Pugh has been forced to address the issue after people at ward meetings complained about streetwalkers in their neighbourhoods.
Pugh utters the standard political response to many social issues: We’ve got to get to the root of the problem. He’s right, of course, but eradicating the poverty and drug use that accompany much prostitution is not going to happen anytime soon. Governments that couldn’t end poverty when they were flush with cash are not about to divert the billions required in these times of austerity.
It has been suggested that prostitution and drugs be decriminalized. Controlling drugs by having them sold and taxed by government is a familiar idea. Thunder Bay’s drug strategy favours decriminalization.
Much of the world has legalized prostitution with varying restrictions. In Canada, you just can’t run a bawdy house or solicit on the street. Classified ads for “adult services” get around this restriction.
Other countries get the problem off the street, and a public nuisance away from complaining neighbours, by licensing brothels.
Among Thunder Bay’s claims to fame is the bawdy house trial of four city police officers charged with conspiring to obstruct justice by tipping off the operators of brothels prior to police raids. All were acquitted.
Details of a 1987 arbitration case into the request of one of the officers to have his legal bills paid — they were — “give a particular perspective of one community and its handling of the issue of prostitution,” the transcript reads.
Its history as a port of call for sailors and a place of leave for bush workers led to “a number of long-established bawdy houses . . . that were known to the community in general and, until recent years, were to a degree tolerated by public authorities, including the police and the judiciary.”
A rookie cop in 1976, Keith Hobbs — now Thunder Bay’s mayor — was driven past brothels by his training officer. When Hobbs asked whey they were not shut down, “he was told that they were tolerated as part of the community . . . . The brothels had always been there and always would be.”
It is against that history of tolerance that one of Thunder Bay’s newest city councillors finds himself trying to assure his constituents that, “hopefully . . . we’re going to make some headway” against nuisance prostitution.
He should not expect the problem to disappear, even in the long term, without a fundamental change to the laws governing prostitution and a remarkable easing of Canadian poverty.