Beware: The feds want to ramp up enforcement of the bawdy house laws

Here's a Vancouver Sun editorial from last week and an excellent column from Sun writer Peter McKnight, sounding the alarm about a potential crackdown on "common bawdy houses" - otherwise known as brothels, escort agencies and massage parlours. The federal government has just designated certain crimes as deserving of more police attention, and one of them is the rarely used bawdy-house law.

The last time there was a government-ordered crackdown, in the 1970s, the result was a dramatic increase in street prostitution and an even more dramatic rise in assaults and murders among sex workers, who now no longer had a safe indoor place to work. We can't let this happen again!