Libby Davies, NPD MP for Vancouver East, knows the dangers posed by the criminalized status of sex workers better than most. It was from her area that more than 60 women disappeared, many of whom were subsequently found to have been murdered. Robert Pickton is on trial for six of those murders.
Davies traces the long rise in violence back to 1985, and a crackdown on the sex trade. The aim then was to go after workers as well as their clients, but it has created a difficult situation, she says.
"Twenty years later, we're still dealing with it in my riding," she says. "The law creates this terrible situation."
She describes the Downtown Eastside area as a "mass of grief."
"So many people end up on the list of murdered people," she says. "The disappearance of more than 60 women from the Downtown Eastside, and hundreds more from across the country, also raises deeply disturbing questions about Canada's justice system and how it failed."
She is calling for a public inquiry into the police handling of the missing-women cases.
Imagine, she says, if five nurses or students went missing.
"But sex workers don't count. They're garbage."
While the Pickton trial has focused the eyes of Canada - and the wider world - on the troubles of her riding, she says the fear is that once the trial ends, "people will forget. Things will go back to the way they were."
Davies sat on the parliamentary committee examining current laws and travelled with it across the country, interviewing 100 sex-trade workers, including men and women in Halifax. She says the situation she encountered around Gottingen Street reminded her of home.
"The status quo is unacceptable. (The laws) are not working. They are creating harm."
What shocks Davies is the vast amount of police resources poured into arresting these women. She calls for a "more humane" approach.
"I believe the federal government must come to terms with the contradictions and impossibility of the status quo, and engage in a process of law reform that will lead to the decriminalization of laws pertaining to prostitution, and focus criminal sanctions on harmful situations."
As all sides of the debate focus on getting workers off the streets, Davies advocates opening "safe houses" in which women can work in a protected environment.
"The community is safer, the women are safer," she says. "Can't we do something to get them indoors?"
Davies is optimistic about the two court challenges, but regrets it may take the courts to force her fellow parliamentarians to "do the right thing," as she says happened in the same-sex marriage debate.
"The issue (should be) to separate what is consenting from what is not," she argues. "Women face the most violence in marriages, but we don't ban marriage. We focus on the violence."