Former sex-trade worker Sheryl Kiselbach, left, and lawyer Katrina Percy speak to the media in May 2009. Kiselbach and a group from Vancouver are trying to mount a constitutional challenge to prostitution laws. (Darryl Dyck/Canadian Press)The Supreme Court heard arguments from a group of Vancouver sex-trade workers on Thursday, who want to re-open a constitutional challenge to prostitution laws.

The Downtown Eastside Sex Workers United Against Violence Society and the federal government have been embroiled in a legal battle since 2007 when the group launched a claim that prostitution-related laws violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Many think the sex-trade workers should have their day in court, if reaction from the CBC community is any indication.

In Thursday's poll about whether Canada's prostitution laws should be amended an overwhelming majority of respondents (roughly 76 per cent of 1770 respondents) said "Yes, activities like keeping a bawdy house and communicating for prostitution should be legal."

Less than 8 per cent said the laws should stay the way they are.

However, support for a change in the status quo was more nuanced in the comments section, which contained many developed arguments from various vantage points.

•    "Since the act of prostitution itself isn't illegal this is clearly a broken system. Either make it illegal outright and enforce the law OR make it legal allowing the transactions to take place indoors and off the streets. Either way sitting in the middle hurts everyone." - Zaminder
• "If one person is willing to sell and another is willing to buy, the state has no place being involved in the transaction. Laws against prostitution have never been about anything more then efforts to force puritanical beliefs onto others that don't share that puritanism." - Dennis Brady
• "Legalize it and tax it. It is not going away. Stop trying to jam a square peg in a round hole and accept the fact prostitution has always and will always be part of society." - JerrytBarnes
• "A sex worker in Ottawa, who's part of the Human Library event on 28 Jan, said during a radio interview that prostitution is legal but doing it safely is not. That was an eye-opener for me. Interestingly, she specializes in providing sexual release to disabled people. Not what you may typically envision, in terms of prostitutes. One of her main wishes was to have health care coverage for things like drugs, dental, vision. Nothing is black-and-white, but I think most people can agree that for these women to face victimization and danger is wrong." - Shannon_Canada
• "Anti-prostitution laws place the activity on the fringes of society and in places of grave danger both to workers and consumers. With no regulations there are no safeguards, no health controls, no quality control of any kind . . . Our concern ought to be normalizing sex and valuing sexual services, at the very least to give sex providers legal recourse against abuse under labour laws, and to squeeze traffickers out of business as far as possible." - Mohammed Barker
• "Taxation creates a new source of income for government, which can help pay for infrastructure and maybe even reduce other taxes! [Regulation] should better protect the workers from violent activity!" - CanAm01
  
  

Although some conceded that the laws may need updating, they rejected notions that prostitution should be encouraged, normalized, or further legalized. Some warned that European precedents, often held up as exemplars, also provide cautionary tales.

• "Once a nation becomes a prostitution-destination, legal authorities have to predict the manpower needed to enforce regulation . . . When the Dutch government legalized prostitution in 2000, it was to protect the women by giving them work permits, but authorities now fear that this business is out of control . . . Recently, officials have noticed an increase in violence centered on this irregular industry, and have blamed this increase on the illegal immigration of individuals into Amsterdam to participate in the sex industry." - 5preadL0veN0tH8
• "[I]n places like Amsterdam where prostitution is allowed as long as workers are registered, most workers choose still not to register and thus work outside the law to avoid Government taxation of their wages." - Slayer01
• "Criminalization of the male demand for paid sex, pimping, trafficking and procuring. De-criminalization of the prostituted. We must NOT open brothels and move the abuse indoors. This would be a gift to pimps and traffickers to have a safe space to house the sold. Prostituted women must have immediate access to women-only detox and long-term recovery beds." - LakeMetis
• "This will never be safe, and even if it were legal there would still be the dirty underbelly of black market trade doing anything it can to avoid being regulated and restricted. The only way for these people to be safe is to not be involved in it." - Kasanova
• "To make it legal you have to address a ton of issues... Regulate the age of 'employees', which means its still illegal for many of them ... define abuse of 'employees'... what isn't 'part of the job' ... Regulate diseases and screening for 'employees', punishments for failing to comply, punishments for lying in order to keep working . . . There is a lot more to consider than legal or not legal . . . the list is long and the financial/ethical implications are astronomical!" - BayRosie
  
  

What do you think of the arguments made by your peers in the CBC community? Please feel free to continue the conversation below, and add to - or challenge - any of discussion points.

Thank you, as always, for following our coverage.

Related:

• Should Canada's prostitution laws be amended?