First, FUCK YOU.
Now that that's out of my system for the moment...
The act of selling sex was and is not illegal in Canada, and until the post-
Bedford changes to prostitution law in Canada, nor was buying sex.
What was illegal were a number of things, among them the three challenged in
Bedford that made prostitution (which was itself, I repeat, not illegal) dramatically more unsafe:
1. Keeping a common bawdy house, ie a brothel. What this meant is that sex workers could not operate in an environment where they could have things like security cameras, making their work dramatically more unsafe. (This is the provision under which Grandma's House, a safe haven at a time when there was a serial killer targeting prostitutes roaming the streets and ultimately claiming at least six and possibly as many as forty-nine victims*, was shut down.)
2. Living off the avails of another's prostitution. (Note that courts had long held that this was limited to doing so for the purposes of supporting that prostitution--a sex worker could still buy groceries with money earned from sex work without the grocer or the prostitute being criminally liable.) This meant that sex workers could not hire bodyguards or receptionists (for the brothels they couldn't have anyway), making their work dramatically more unsafe.
3. Communicating in public for the purposes of prostitution. What this meant was that sex workers, already mostly forced to work on the street, could not legally negotiate price or other matters, such as condom use, until they had already gotten to a private place with their client, which was necessarily far more unsafe than being able to do so in a place where other sex workers could watch out for them.
Again: selling sex was and is legal; buying sex was legal at the time of
Bedford and is no longer so (which, again, I think is stupid). The bawdy-house provision necessarily limited prostitution to street prostitution or outcalls, which were themselves then made unconstitutionally unsafe by the other provisions.
And now I'm angry again: FUCK YOU FOR TRYING TO IMPOSE YOUR ASS-BACKWARDS "MORALITY" ON THE REST OF US WHO DO NOT SUBSCRIBE TO ITS UNPROVEN UNDERPINNINGS.
There is simply no reason for prostitution to be illegal, and if it were fully legal it would be much easier for those sex workers in problematic situations to get out of those situations by going to the police for protection without worrying about law enforcement looking into what laws they might have broken, and it would also mean that prostitutes could work without the fear that, since all of their clients are committing a criminal act simply by engaging their services, that client might not decide that, already being a criminal, there is far less disincentive to commit other criminal acts, such as taking the sex further than the prostitute is comfortable going (ie rape) or becoming the next Pickton (ie murder).
And, to quote the late George Carlin:
Selling is legal. Fucking is legal. Why isn't selling fucking legal?
*Pickton was convicted of six charges of second-degree murder. Since that was enough to put him away for life, the Crown dropped another twenty murder charges. He evidently confessed to forty-nine murders to an undercover agent posing as a cellmate, saying he wished he could have killed another woman to have an even fifty. (Note: Pickton was charged with first-degree murder, but was acquitted of that and convicted of second-degree murder. However, he was sentenced on all six counts to life without parole for twenty-five years--second-degree murder allows anywhere from ten to twenty-five--which is what he would have received had he been convicted of first-degree murder, where twenty-five years is automatic.)