The Tories, of course, are appalled by the idea.

Here's a partial quote from the article below:

In an attempt to create Canada’s first cooperative bawdy house, sex-work organization the British Columbia Coalition of Experiential Communities (BCCEC) will submit a request to Parliament for amnesty from an anti-brothel provision within the next six months, and is preparing for a community-wide meeting to iron out the final details of its plan.

Susan Davis, coordinator for the cooperative brothel project, wants the meeting to demonstrate that the safe site can be mutually beneficial to the residents and sex workers of the downtown eastside, where sex work is most prevalent.

“We need to show [the community] how the co-op will benefit them,” Davis said. “If they don’t want to see a pile of condoms behind their houses, they need to let us provide somewhere for sex workers to throw them away. If they don’t want to look out their window and see a guy getting a blowjob, then let us bring them inside.”

Davis hopes that community support will improve the likelihood of acquiring amnesty from the provision within the walls of the brothel. Canada’s criminal code prohibts the existence of brothels, places that are kept and frequented for the practice of prostitution.

BCCEC devised plans for the brothel following the Vancouver Police Department’s [VDP] systematic removal of safer sites for sex workers. Since January 2007, the VPD has closed a number of strip clubs and one-hour hotels in an effort to undermine organized crime.

BCCEC says that sex workers were forced to the streets and into more marginal neighborhoods.

“[When] they push people into the street, dancers with $10,000 boob jobs start turning tricks for $3. They don’t want to be escorts, they want to dance. It is a self-reinforcing nightmare,” Davis said.

With Vancouver’s lower mainland shaken by the recent conviction of Robert Pickton for killing six sex workers from the downtown eastside – although he is accused of murdering dozens more over two decades – the co-op brothel seeks to make the sex work environment more secure. While providing an indoor space sheltered from street violence, Davis explained that the co-op brothel would also afford sex workers with the health and sanitary standards enforced within Canadian workplaces.