Advocates for sex workers say Canadian law puts prostitutes in danger, and it's high time they received the same kind of rights others workers have come to expect.

Although selling sex for money is legal in Canada, almost every other activity connected with prostitution is illegal.

It's against the law to communicate in public for the purposes of prostitution, or for a prostitute to do business in her own home or to rent a location for the purpose of doing business.

A report released Tuesday by the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network claims these rules endanger sex workers and need to be repealed, and argues that sex workers should have the same protection as all Canadians.

"It's really hard to have safe sex working conditions and safe work places if your work is criminalized and your work places are criminalized," the organization's deputy director, Richard Elliott, told CTV News.

The current laws strain relationships between police and workers and make it difficult for sex workers to assess their clients and negotiate a transaction on the street, Elliott said Tuesday.

"If you think about it you are constantly under the risk of arrest. If you are talking to a client on the street for example to negotiate a transaction, then you don't have a lot of time to size-up your client and see if this is someone that you want to get into a car and go someplace with," he explained.

"You don't have a lot of time to negotiate safer sex… and it creates a relationship with police that's often conflictual and so sex workers aren't entitled to the protection of the law as a result of that."

The organization is asking all parties where they stand on the issue, and said that a parliamentary subcommittee was examining the impact of the current law on prostitutes before the election writ was dropped. They want that work to continue after the election is over.

The organization also believes the law turns a blind eye to prostitution in upscale massage parlours and escort services but deprives sex workers on the street of the most basic protection.

"The available evidence indicates that an inordinate proportion of police and court resources directed at combating prostitution is targeted at street-based prostitution," says the report.

Yet street prostitution accounts for only about 20 per cent of the sex trade, says the study.

Police tend to enforce the solicitation law against street prostitutes but not against escort services that advertise their services in newspapers and telephone books, critics say.

"The criminal law is driven by complaints for the most part. If sex workers are on the street they get hassled, they get attention from neighbours and attention from police. But things like body rub parlours and escort services, because they're happening behind closed doors, don't draw police attention," Leon Mar, a spokesman for the organization said.

The effect of such "selective" enforcement policies is to drive street prostitutes into more dangerous areas where they are vulnerable to predators, says the study.

According to recent figures, 69 female sex workers are missing or dead in the Vancouver area, and 84 in Edmonton. A disproportionate number are aboriginal.

"We have had this incredibly hypocritical attitude," New Democrat Libby Davies told The Canadian Press.

"Ninety per cent of enforcement is on street-level prostitution, what I would call the survival sex trade. Those women are there because of poverty, addiction, exploitation," Davies, who served on the committee that was examining the solicitation law before the government fell, added.

She said such women are afraid to seek protection when threatened because of the law sets up an adversarial relationship with police.

Liberal Hedy Fry, who was also a member of the committee, told CP she believes the criminal ban on solicitation should be dropped.

"The status quo isn't working because too many women have died, too many have been dying. The problem we found is that many women who were on the street were at greater risk.

"Every time they were picked up for soliciting they would go into a darker and darker place . . . so they became victims of people who preyed on women."