Remember that in Canada, prostitution was already almost legal. You could prostitute yourself so long as you didn't harass customers or walk up to people and offer your services. You could however put ads in the newspaper for "Angela, 38DD, busty and hot, will massage you... all over".
One of the things that you couldn't do was also very hurtful. You couldn't team up with other street workers in order to insure your safety. That would be a whorehouse, and they are illegal.
So, you end up with girls in the streets, with no security, who cannot even talk straight about what they were willing and not willing to do.
I'm very happy that those laws are lifted. And it doesn't come out of the blue. There has been discussions about in in the media in recent years, and I believe that most people understood that forbidding those girls to have security is an idiocy.
Prostitution in the Netherlands went through a similar transition a few years ago, it's now fully decriminalised.
The results have been mixed however. It has created a new market of prostitutes, typically illegal immigrants forced into it by human traffickers, who are willing to do more for less than the legal ones. Meanwhile the legal ones are forced to pay taxes with all the paper work that comes with it, since they are now first class citizens, and they are understandably unhappy about that and typically try to evade taxes, making their activity illegal again.
I don't think criminalising it again would be a good idea, but there is no easy solution for this issue.
It used to be when I was an undergrad, and probably still is, that a certain number of unmarried women living under one roof was defined a brothel under New Hampshire law. This meant a lot of women's dormitories fell under the definition.
I think the GP meant, if a prostitute went up and offered her services to a john, and the john said yes, that would be considered "solicitation" on the part of the john. Which is to say, prostitution was legal for the prostitute, but illegal for the john.
Jut to clarify: "solicitation" (which is not, in fact, the offense; more properly, it is "communicating in a public place for the purposes of prostitution") applies to both parties, and the actual transaction is legal for both parties (according to existing Canadian law). Any of the "middle man" activities are generally illegal (procurement, operating a common bawdy-house, transportation, and "living on the avails" where exploitation is involved) are illegal.
Johns don't passively sit in coffee shops or stand in line at Best Buy while beset by offers of sex for money. They roll up on girls and women walking down the street in an attempt to purchase sex.
I've been approached a couple times for sitting in a parking lot waiting for my wife to get off work. I've been approached a few times whilst doing a job in a poor area of town.
You've got a very naive view of the world, you clearly have never lived in the situation and areas that you seem to claim expertise in.
These women need money more than a lot of their patrons are looking for sex.
I don't know if you've ever walked down a street where there are desperate streetwalkers (usually drug-addicts; e.g. crack addicts on Hastings here in Vancouver) but even if you say nothing to them, they'll follow you for blocks trying to get you to pay them.
I have never been a John, and I have been chased down the street by prostitutes with varying degrees of aggressiveness. In one instance two of them grabbed my arms and tried to drag me
I often get asked if I'm "looking for company", or "want to party" by scantily-clad young (and old) women (and men passing as women) on my evening walks around my neighborhood here in SF.
One of the things that you couldn't do was also very hurtful. You couldn't team up with other street workers in order to insure your safety. That would be a whorehouse, and they are illegal.
So, you end up with girls in the streets, with no security, who cannot even talk straight about what they were willing and not willing to do.
I'm very happy that those laws are lifted. And it doesn't come out of the blue. There has been discussions about in in the media in recent years, and I believe that most people understood that forbidding those girls to have security is an idiocy.