Municipalities Define Escort Agencies for Convenience
Author: Pat Boardman
Category: Legal
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Our society has always been in favor of people who are attractive and who have money. In the municipalities of Canada a loose system of bylaws and licensing tries to deal with adult services of all types where it is generally understood that money will be exchanged for sex by two consenting adults in a private place, but the class system leaves many working women out on the street.
In Canada the regulation of businesses such as nude dancing, escorts, and massage parlours are left up to the municipalities, in accordance with provincial law. Operating licences are given to certain groups and others are dealt with by handing out fines to some extent, and those usually go to the poorest segment of the trade. The hefty licensing fees are not something everyone can afford but they still exist; officially escort services and massage parlours are not part of the sex trade. Escorts provide companionship and massage rooms provide massage. Strippers are not usually prostitutes since their incomes are astronomical. There is no effective effort to re-train strippers or rehabilitate prostitutes due to the large amounts of money available from gentleman customers.
Adapting to modern life requires some evolved morality to see past mere prejudice or indignation and consider the e wider effect of regulating the sex trade equally. Some escort agencies pay a license fee, some don't. They are categorized separately from body-rub parlours, who pay over $6500 each year to operate; the body-rub parlour is defined as a place where the activities include the kneading, manipulation, rubbing, massaging, touching, or stimulating, by an means, of a person's body or part thereof but does not include medical or therapeutic treatment given by a person otherwise duly qualified, licensed or registered to do so under the law. The body-rub license in Vancouver is $6,527 a year, the third largest fee after the racetrack and the Pacific National Exhibition. In contrast the escort service license is only $802.
Each city normally licenses and regulates all the escort agencies and strip clubs but only a fraction of the more numerous body-rub parlours are inspected, licensed, or regulated because of the fee required to identify them as such, and the license fees required for all the workers. The police don't spend time and resources on sting operations, it's very much a live-and-let-live arrangement as long as discretion is used and zoning regulations aren't broken. If they don't bother the neighbors then it's business as usual. Like most people in Canada, the police no longer feel that they should be enforcing a moral code on consenting adults. The women who suffer most are working on the city streets; they don't have a place to go and they are often victims who need help rather than criminal prosecution for soliciting.
Dating services are treated as totally different entities, even though they are in essentially the same business of getting people together for companionship and sex; they just don't provide the premises for encounters. They are licensed at around $100 a year and must record the names of their customers, unlike the discreet necessities of the massage and escort sector. The law gives a bigger break to the escorts than the taxpaying dating service. Escort agencies that arrange for prostitutes to meet clients violate the laws against "procuring" - including the "pimping" offence of living on the avails of prostitution. If you take the law literally even the Yellow Pages and other advertising forums could be said to violate procuring laws when they carry ads for prostitution services, particularly when advertisers recruit new staff. There is one big flea in the ointment however: escort agencies spend enormous sums to advertise. There are many companies that rely on the hundreds of thousands of dollars brought in every year from the full-page ad campaigns of the cash-rich escort sector. In the current economic state of things, any money circulating has to be encouraged, including the collection of taxes from areas of the sex trade carried on in cash - basically the entire industry.
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Keywords: erotic massage, female escorts, restaurant bar, london ontario, bachelor party, vip entertainment, massage parlours, adult videos, exotic dancers, escort agency
View Count: 246
Date Submitted: 1/22/2010
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