Andrea Werhun is a performer, producer and author of Modern Whore: A Memoir.

On a cool, spring day in March of 2021, the Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform (CASWLR) launched a court case at the Ontario Superior Court to challenge several sex work-related criminal offences, arguing that they violated sex workers’ constitutional rights to life, liberty, and security as protected by the Canadian Charter.

There was hope in the air, inspired by the bold challenge of the Alliance, a coalition of 25 groups from across the country with a mandate to protect sex workers’ rights, including six individual applicants. Advocates and allies were inspired, too, by the generations of Canadian sex worker activists who have long fought for our right to work safely, with dignity, free from discrimination.

Perhaps this time, things would be different.

We had hope in 2013, when the Supreme Court of Canada struck down three prostitution-related offences in Bedford v. Canada, which prohibited sex workers from working together indoors; from hiring security and other third-parties; and from communicating in public, which prevented sex workers from screening clients and safely negotiating boundaries, and disproportionately targeted racialized, two-spirit, transgender, drug-using and houseless street-based sex workers.

The evidence was irrefutable. The Supreme Court called the laws “dangerous,” adding they prevented “people engaged in a risky – but legal – activity from taking steps to protect...

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