If you think the present laws treat providers unjustly, just read how they treat the friends and a quaintances of providers.
In this particular case, the provider did act disgracefully towards her guest, granted, but that still did not excuse the authorities to do what they did.
A Chinese lady learnt through social media that an acquaitance from China was in the same city as her. On one occasion, the acquaintance complained of being bored out of her mind and so the Chinese lady agreed to lend her her tablet on which she could watch Chinese films because she was the friend of a friend.
A few weeks later, that acquaintance invited her over to cook her a meal for her birthday. The Chinese lady, thinking nothing of it, accepted.
Once at the house, she gave her acquaintance a birthday gift and put the food in the fridge and then sat at the kitchen table to chat for a bit. Soon after she sat down, she heard a knock on the door and her acquaintance went to answer, leaving the Chinese lady at the table with two other ladies.
The acquaintance came back seconds later to tell her guest to wait there for a few minutes and then went upstairs with someone.
Soon later, the guest had to use the washroom and another lady at the table directed her to the upstairs washroom.
When she came out, her host, now dressed in lingerie, informed her that the police had arrived, directed her to a room, opened the door, pointed to the closet, and told her her that her tablet was in that closet and that she should get it before the police seize it.
The guest, in a state of confusion, entered the room, dashed for the closet, and began to teach for the tablet just when she heard a knock on the door that had closed automatically behind her.
She answered right away and met a local police officer. That is when she heard a man say something and, looking back, noticed a man putting his clothes on.
She was arrested, sent to the CBS for questioning, and was charged with working as a sex worker and was never even offered counsel. Just before she left the house to head for the CBSA office, she called her fiance to tell him of an incident at the house, that she'd have to accompany the police for questioning (she was not even aware that they were about to arrest her, thinking that they were treating her as a person of interest or a suspect at most, confident in the proof of her innocence).
While she was being transfered to a detention centre, her fiance looked for her, called the local police, immigration, the CBSA, and eventually 911 as he tried to find who knew of her.
He eventually contacted a lawyer and the lawyer won her bond hearing. The CBSA officer who had interviewed her claimed that she did not know her fiance's surname, where he lived, and any local tourist attraction. At the the bond hearing, she'd proved all of it false by answering the questions.
Eventually, her fiance received a package in the mail with the police and CBSA reports. The police report described all of the women in the house as wearing lingerie. Not only did she claim it to be false, but she challenged the officers to present a witness statement from the man in the room detailing what she was doing in the room, how she was dressed, and how the others were dressed.
Luckily for her, she also had scars and tattoos on her body and the police report claimed it was a trafficking investigation and described the room in such detail as to mention even the tacks in the outside wall holding up a curtain that caused the light shining through to create a red eminence and mentioned a used condom on the floor.
Given the pertinence of scars and tattoos to a human trafficking investigation and that the report mentioned no such markings, and that the police did not even get a witness statement, the judge ruled the police and CBSA statements improbable and suspicious and so ruled in her favor.
He also made mention of the problems with the reports. Though he addressed the matter obliquely, he was clearly criticizing the extremely broken English of both the police and CBSA reports. I had a chance to read them myself and I kid you not when I say the reports were written in such broken English as to even be difficult to decipher.
Shockingly, the Minister appealed.
Even more shockingly, the appeal judge had inadvertently revealed in his criticism of the first judge's ruling that he had not even clearly understood it. Near the end of the appeal hearing, when the counsel of the accused reminded the judge that this was supposed to have been a human trafficking investigation, the judge started flipping through his pages asking for confirmation. Did he not read the police report he had to rule on!?
He overturned the previous ruling.
The accused appealed to Federal court. Ironically, the counsel for the accused was pointing out how in a criminal investigation, we expect the police to collect readily available proof like sinple witness statements. The judge condescendingly asked if the counsel really believed that the officer could just ask the man in the room and that the man would just admit to paying for sex.
The counsel reminded him that a man in another room was asked and readily confessed and even specified with whom. In human trafficking, we'd want to know who offered whose services to whom in exchange for money to be given to whom.
Shockingly the counsel for the minister of public safety and emergency preparedness argued that regardless of the criminal investigation, the accused was accused of just working without a visa and so the police had no more obligation to collect proof than if she'd been preparing food at a restaurant without a visa.
Surprisingly, the Federal Judge agreed and concluded that regardless of the criminal investigation, she was just accused of working for in Canada without a visa so the police had no obligation to collect more proof.
This creates a dangerous precedent that reduces any incentive for criminal investigators to investigate crimes when foreign nationals are involved due to theower burden of proof required essentially making the accused guilty until found innocent beyond a reasonable doubt.
Though in this particular case, it was disgraceful of the host to invite a guest and then accept customers while the guest waits downstairs, still, a police officer should be literate enough to know the meaning of words and phrases like human trafficking, lingerie, and bottoms which the police report itself revealed they might not have known by their incorrect use of the terms. Also, when a person is intercepted in a supposed human trafficking investigation, we don't expect the interviewing officer to botch the interview and then write her report in broken English after having misunderstood everything.
And we don't expect a judge to accept an uncorroborated report written by anonymous police officers who refuse to testify especially when they could so easily have collected simple witness statements in a human trafficking investigation.
Wherever one sits on the prostitution debate, one would think everyone could agree that at the very least, the police should be expected to present readily available proof and refusal to do so should raise suspicions in an intelligent Judge.
