MONTREAL -- One year after the mayor promised to crack down on erotic massage parlours, Montreal still doesn't know what it's going to do with the hundreds of establishments operating right across the city. Without a firm policy, community groups and massage parlour owners say the police are letting the de-facto brothels operate under a tacit agreement: don't hire minors, don't force women to do anything they don't want to do, and keep organized crime out of it.
Yanik Chicoine, 37, operates two erotic massage parlours in Montreal's east-end and said police leave him alone despite the fact some of his employees sell their bodies for money inside his business. Operators and organizations representing prostitutes say that strategy means erotic massage parlours continue to operate across the island with relative impunity and recent federal anti-prostitution law that came into effect late last year is, at least in part, being ignored.
Mayor Denis Coderre had a plan to clean the city of the brothels but a Supreme Court of Canada ruling in late forced the government to re-draft the country's prostitution laws and put the mayor's ambitious plans on hold. A new federal law went into effect last December and re-criminalized brothel owners and clients, re-confirming the illegality of the city's erotic parlours where women sell sex.
The mayor's spokesman, Louis-Pascal Cyr, said discussions are ongoing between city officials, lawyers and local police as they develop an action plan. How to deal with the issue is mixed: Chicoine and other parlour owners want prostitution to be decriminalized entirely while advocacy groups that deal with prostitution in Montreal are split.
Chicoine said his businesses are transparent, clean, safe and should be legal because prostitution will never disappear. Dianne Matte, spokeswoman for CLES, a Montreal-based anti-prostitution advocacy group that helps women leave the sex trade, said the new laws on the books need to be enforced.
