Sessional Assistant Professor in Critical Human Rights, Department of Equity Studies, York University, Canada. The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Queen's University, Ontario provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation CA. Queen's University, Ontario , York University , and Carleton University provide funding as members of The Conversation CA-FR.
York University and Carleton University provide funding as members of The Conversation CA. The federal government recently announced its intention to amend the Expungement of Historically Unjust Convictions Act to expand the list of offences Canadians can apply to have struck from their criminal records. The list now includes abortion-related offences and indecent acts in a bawdy house. We are a group of gay and lesbian historians who study the criminalization of queer communities in Canada.
While we applaud changes that allow women and abortion providers to apply to have their records expunged, we question the partial and historically faulty way the government has added bawdy-house offences to the act. Sex workers charged with bawdy-house offences, for example, remain excluded from accessing the expungement process. In other words, if a bawdy-house conviction was only about indecency, people can now apply to have their records expunged. But if there are any allegations of sex work related to their convictions, they cannot.
However, police often alleged both indecency and sex work were taking place inside the bawdy houses. In , the federal government passed Bill C, which established a process to expunge the records for those who had been convicted of historically unjust offences. It left out bawdy-house laws, indecency, vagrancy and criminalization for HIV non-disclosure. We also argued the application process was too onerous.
