For example, a sex worker can’t work from home if they’re a renter because leases have provisions banning illegal activity on the premises, she said. A sex worker setting up a working space for other sex workers is also illegal, so they’re not allowed to set up co-working spaces or purchase hotel rooms for one another.

The Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act, or Bill C-36, says that in Canada you cannot buy sex, advertise sex, make money selling sex, procure a person selling sex or talk about selling sex in public. Sex workers get an exemption for making money from and advertising sex.

This also prevents sex workers from working with third parties to help with advertising, find clients or run a business, Clamen added.

So, the sticky legal morass is the issue of the pimp (or, as it is more colloquially referred to, the Employer) who seeks to tax some or all of the sex worker's earnings as a condition of her doing business in the area. On the one hand, criminality affords the pimp more leverage by offering "protection" as a condition of rent-seeking the worker. On the other hand, a lot of what is being described above - acquiring working space, soliciting, contracting out sex workers, and extending credit to sex workers - is exactly what a pimp does, in practice.

What we're really getting boxed in by is the very idea of capitalist rent-seeking through the operation of a business. When you're selling anything else, the rent-seeking is considered a value-generating profit motive of an entrepreneur. But as soon as what you're selling involves sex worker's services, we realize what we're advocating is human trafficking.

The Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform’s website notes how Indigenous women, racialized immigrants and trans people, especially trans women, face disproportionately higher levels of policing regardless of their participation in sex work. “The criminalization of the sale or exchange of sexual services gravely exacerbates their stigmatization and marginalization,” the website adds.

You can trace this down a bit further and discover how many of these officers are themselves involved in the protection racket, extorting sex workers for money or outright assaulting them under cover of law by using the threat of an arrest as leverage.

Border security agents are using facial recognition software to identify sex workers and tie their online profiles or ads to their legal identification, Rothschild said. When these programs are successful at matching people’s faces to their ads, they can get banned from travelling to the United States for 10 years, or will have to pay $10,000 to be allowed to re-enter the country, they added.

The Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and its regulations prohibit anyone without Canadian citizenship or permanent residence from doing sex work and presumes migrant sex workers need rescuing rather than supports that enable them to make their own work decisions, according to the Alliance for Gender Justice in Migration.

This prohibition, combined with strict bylaws like the background checks required in Richmond, means sex workers in the most precarious positions are pushed further into the margins, Rothschild said.

The end result of these rules is to limit workers' freedom to travel, to earn income, and to accumulate property. And the goal of these policies - whether it is admitted to or not - is ultimately to compel these workers into underpaid (or outright unpaid) servitude.

The purpose of the system is its results. And modern laws around sex work are designed to compel people into unpaid labor.