Today@Dal

From Saturday's Globe and Mail:

The unanimous 9-0 ruling shows that the country’s most influential court, which now has a majority of its members appointed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, is as unwilling as ever to defer to government when it perceives government using criminal laws in ways that put vulnerable people at risk of severe harm or death.

The ruling is one of the biggest since Canada’s criminal law of abortion was struck down in 1988. A similar principle was at the heart of that case: Criminalizing people at risk will not be tolerated if it is done in such a way as to heighten risks. In this case, Ottawa argued that prostitutes bring the risks on themselves, but the court accepted that vulnerable people are not always in a position to avoid risk. “Many prostitutes have no meaningful choice,” Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin wrote for the court.

The court’s willingness to spend its political capital on the protection of prostitutes, by striking down laws with roots that go back decades, and even to pre-Confederation days, sends an unmistakable message to the Conservative government: Any new laws would have to “take seriously the safety concerns of people who are engaged in sex work,” said Elaine Craig, a law professor at Dalhousie University.

Read the rest of this article online.