The rules allow the Ontario Court of Appeal to take up to six months to release a decision. I know, from personal experience before this court, that they do take the full amount of time allotted to them when they consider any complex issue. We shouldn't expect a decision before late November. Applications to the Supreme Court of Canada take months to prepare and many more months will elapse before an appeal is heard there, too.
The Harper government runs on polls and surveys. While the prime minister and some MPs may personally prefer to reduce or eliminate women's access to abortions in Canada, every reputable survey shows that the Canadian public is strongly opposed to re-opening the debate.
Canadians are also in favour of decriminalizing prostitution, as Wrinkled in Time outlined, above. The article in this weekend's Globe and Mail, "Why the courts must decriminalize prostitution," has had more than 660 comments as I write this post, and the great majority of those comments are in favour of the article. Most print media estimate that a single written comment represents the views and values of at least 1,500 readers who did not comment. In simple terms, those 660 comments may represent up to about 10,000 readers. One should make allowances for trolls and for simple, one-line responses, but even with that downward adjustment, the number of responses in favour of the article is significant. The Harper government will take note of this--they would be very foolish not to. And, whatever any of us may think about this government and its MPs, they are not stupid, ignorant or incapable of thinking things through.
Canadians do not think that the laws presently on the books are working. We may not have much of an idea about what drives women into street prostitution, but no one can ignore the truth: it's the most dangerous form of prostitution, anywhere, because the women who engage in it are too easily preyed upon by guys like Robert Picton.
I imagine that the biggest concern for most of the public is that they don't want to have a brothel in their own neighbourhood. They imagine that brothels will bring in a lot of undesirable traffic, noise and dangerous elements. That's fair enough, I suppose, if the stereotype were accurate, but it's not. Most paid companions who work indoors as independents are operating brothels, even if only one woman is working in them. We are all over the country, in every city and in every neighbourhood. We're hard to notice and most of us wouldn't have it any other way.