STREETS FOR WALKING

THE people who are trying to make homes on Magnus Avenue, the scene of
a recent spate of violence unusual even by Winnipeg standards, have
various explanations for it and offer various suggestions about what
might be done to clean up their street and their area.

One explanation involves the proliferation of crack houses, another
the proliferation of prostitution. Both result, at least in part, from
police actions. When the police crack down on drug dens on one street,
the dealers and addicts move to another -- the criminal world operates
on the law of supply and demand more rigourously than do many
legitimate businesses. The same applies to prostitution. You can move
the prostitutes and their customers from one street to another, but
you cannot remove the supply that one offers and the demand the other
makes.

Crack houses may be an insoluble problem until society gets a better
handle on how to deal with drug abuse, and that seems likely to take
some time. The problem that Magnus Avenue residents face from
prostitution, however, could be dealt with quickly and the failure to
deal with it can be laid squarely on the doorsteps of elected
politicians too fearful, or too hypocritical, to legalize, license and
regulate what is essentially the most victimless of crimes --
consensual sex as a business transaction.

As long as solicitation for the purposes of prostitution remains a
crime, police enforcement of it will only move the problem from one
street, one area, to another. Even as residents of Magnus Avenue were
wondering why Winnipeg can't create a legal red-light district and so
make at least one of their problems disappear, federal members of
Parliament were arguing about whether the law should hold prostitutes
or their customers more culpable.

The Conservative government appears to have no inclination to reform
these pointlessly punitive laws in any way at all. Liberal and New
Democratic MPs say the law should be rewritten to put the more severe
punishment on johns and pimps, and perhaps there could be a case made
for that. It is, however, the wrong case. The case that needs to be
argued, the change in the law that needs to be made is to completely
legalize and adequately regulate the business of prostitution. If
society cannot be rid of it -- it is notoriously the world's oldest
profession -- then it can at least make it safer for workers and less
intrusive on the lives of people who would rather not see it. That
would make life better and more secure for prostitutes and make the
streets of Canada's inner cities, such as Magnus Avenue, safer and
happier for the people who live on them.