Nathan VanderKlippe
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Apr 17/02) - Put yourself in Rene Bauhaus' shoes. He is a father of two, married, works for the Worker's Compensation Board. His wife, Paula, runs a day home out of their house in downtown Yellowknife.

Late last year, Paula reads a simple notice in the City of Yellowknife's weekly mailing. The city has granted a home-based business permit for an entertainment service, which will be located just across the street from their home.

Rene calls the city to find out more details about the permit. Dissatisfied with what he is told, he appeals the permit. At the appeals hearing, he discovers that the permit was issued to Angie Fehr, a 61-year-old Ontario woman who already runs an escort service in Thunder Bay.

She says she intends to operate the escort service, but won't be living in Yellowknife. The permit is overturned on a technicality: you can't run a home-based business if you don't live in the home.

The experience galvanizes Bauhaus to further action. Concerned first for his own neighbourhood, he begins to think about the broader community. Wanting to make sure the city has a bylaw in place before another escort service tries to put down roots, he pesters city council.

Now, councillors are in the middle of trying to decide whether they can regulate -- and if so, how to do it.

Legitimate service?

For her part, Fehr argues that escort services are legitimate. She doesn't sell sex, she said last December: "I sell companionship."

But few people buy that line. Escort services are "a front for prostitution," says Barb Saunders, executive director of the NWT Status of Women Council. "To think otherwise would be naive."

Not that either escort services or prostitution are illegal. A municipality may not ban a specific type of business, nor can it indirectly block its operation. That means a city is obliged to grant a business permit to any business that meets city regulations.

However, a bevy of Canadian Criminal Code sections make it exceedingly difficult to prostitute legally: it is illegal to advertise for the purposes of prostitution, to own, run, transport or occupy a common bawdy-house, and to procure or live off the avails of prostitution.

So a city has the power to close an escort service if it discovers evidence of illegal prostitution.

But cities also have the power to levy hefty permit fees and use zoning bylaws to define permitted locations for escort services. A growing number of municipalities charge thousands of dollars annually to run an escort service, and then charge to licence each escort.

The logic, according to Yellowknife Coun. Robert Hawkins, goes like this: "if you don't want this in your community, make it as difficult as possible."

In Winnipeg, escort services have been restrictively zoned into the downtown core.

The annual licence fee is about $3,800, and licensed services have to maintain a full client list and submit to health inspections.

To squelch unlicensed services, the city has struck agreements with the Winnipeg Free Press, the Winnipeg Sun and Manitoba Telephone Systems to not print ads for escort services or massage parlours without city licence numbers.

In Edmonton, agencies are prohibited from advertising without providing a licence number. An agency licence costs $4,000 a year; each escort must purchase a $100 annual licence.

Back in Yellowknife

Some Yellowknife councillors have already seen a draft recommendation on restricting the services. Presented at the April 2 public services committee meeting, it suggested council restrict escort services from operating as home-based businesses, and require them to obtain a business licence.

After discussing the recommendation, councillors voted to send it back to administration. Some said it was too weak, and should include more specific measures to regulate escort services.

Bauhaus, who has done his own research on the subject, agreed -- and he wondered why councillors didn't know more about the subject.

"I felt that they were very unprepared," he said.

Most councillors don't want to see escort services in Yellowknife.

Mayor Gord Van Tighem said his "inclination is not to allow it."

"If it's strongly the will of the community that a certain industry not be here, and if legislating is the way to do it, then let's do it and get it over with," he said.

Coun. Blake Lyons agreed.

"Personally, I'm opposed to escort services," he said. "(But) the law is the law and I can't override laws with my personal views."

Coun. Dave Ramsay said the community needs to think about ways to respond.

"It's an evil that might find its way into our community," he said.

"But if you don't use the service then they don't have a very profitable business."

But, he added, the issue is not as simple as it looks. "I wouldn't want to see us, by banning escort services, pushing some young people into the prostitution business because there's a market there for it."

Fees and social programs

John Lowman is a professor of criminology at Simon Fraser University, where he has studied prostitution for the last two and a half decades.

He argues that cities need to be cautious when leveraging large fees for escort services. "There's two ways of looking at licensing fees," he said. "One is that they are meant to be a deterrent. The second is the state pimp wants its cut."

And fees don't act as very good deterrents, since even a $4,000 business permit would still only comprise a fraction of an escort service's annual budget. Even so, fees can be a good idea if the money raised is funnelled back into social programs, he said.

"We need other things," Lowman added. "We need solutions to addictions and poverty."

In Yellowknife, that could mean programs to help deal with teenage prostitution.

"A lot of people don't want to admit that we have a prostitution problem here," said Ramsay. "It's here, and it's a reality. We should be trying to deal with it."

Capt. Karen Hoeft of the Salvation Army said the community needs to ask why people would go into prostitution and then address the root causes, things like inadequate finances and sexual abuse in the home.

Saunders says programs are needed for men, since without a market the service won't last. "It should not always be the women that are having to look for solutions," she said. "Maybe it's time men need to examine their behaviour."

Not the first time

Discussion of escort services is not new for Yellowknife. In 1991, the city granted a development permit for a home-based business to Yellowknife Escort Services. It set up shop in the middle of a residential area in Old Town.

John Pelletier, the development officer who granted the permit, says no one protested at the time. But the service didn't last long. Pelletier wasn't asked to renew the permit the following year.

Short of Fehr's attempt, no one has tried to set up an escort service in Yellowknife since that time.

So current pushes for bylaw regulations come when the service doesn't even exist.

But, said Saunders, it's just a matter of time before such bylaw, if passed, is put to use.

"You've got an influx of primarily male workers coming from the south," she said.

"It's a good market for the service, unfortunately."