Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government can’t rag the puck much longer on Canada’s antiquated sex trade laws. The laws put vulnerable workers needlessly at risk. Now, the Supreme Court has given Parliament a year to rewrite them, paying more attention to the safety of those in the sex trade.

After Robert Pickton’s grisly serial murders — he boasted of killing 49 prostitutes and other women in British Columbia — this well-reasoned, landmark ruling was to be expected, and welcomed. The only surprise was its strength and sweeping scope.

Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin and her colleagues voted — unanimously — to strike down all three of Canada’s major prostitution-related prohibitions as overbroad, grossly disproportionate and unconstitutional because they impose “dangerous conditions” on how workers operate and “heighten the risks,” violating the basic Charter right to security of the person.

“They prevent people engaged in a risky — but legal — activity from taking steps to protect themselves from the risks,” McLachlin wrote. “Parliament has the power to regulate against nuisances, but not at the cost of the health, safety and lives of prostitutes.”

While the sex trade is a dangerous, ugly, exploitative reality that stirs controversy about human dignity, personal autonomy and public safety, it is legal. Given that, the law shouldn’t force sex workers to put themselves in even greater jeopardy every time they turn a trick. But that’s just what it does.

As the Star’s Tonda MacCharles reports, Parliament needs to redraft the Criminal Code’s triple ban on brothels, on living off the avails of prostitution and on communicating for the purposes of prostitution. The court acknowledged that regulation is a “complex and delicate matter.” Even so, the law must take more cognizance of the practical safety issues facing those who “often have little choice but to sell their bodies for money” because they are financially desperate, for example, or have drug addictions.

If Ottawa doesn’t act, prostitutes will be free a year from now to ply their trade, hire staff and freely screen clients.

Inevitably, this ruling has brought calls for Ottawa to recriminalize prostitution, rather than rewrite the law. But that is a counsel of folly. Recriminalization would be unenforceable, ineffective and unwise. It would further stigmatize sex workers rather than rehabilitate or protect them, and would push the trade deeper into the shadows, putting the vulnerable at greater risk. The better approach is to rewrite the law so that it passes constitutional muster.

This needn’t mean that “anything goes” on the streets of our cities and towns. Far from it. Ottawa could allow sex workers to operate out of brothels or homes where they can better protect themselves, for example. Many already do. It could fine-tune the ban on living off the avails in a way that maintains “exploitive” pimping as a crime but that also allows prostitutes to hire bodyguards and other staff. With those safeguards in place, Ottawa might find itself on stronger ground arguing, for example, that the ban on communicating in public about a proposed act of prostitution — street prostitution — is a reasonable restriction to prevent nuisance solicitation, drug trafficking and other problems.

As the Supreme Court pointed out, Parliament has flexibility in deciding where and how prostitution may be conducted. “The regulation of prostitution is a complex and delicate matter. It will be for Parliament, should it choose to do so, to devise a new approach, reflecting different elements of the existing regime.” What matters is the overall impact of the laws.

The challenge for Ottawa is to get that right. Laws that perversely impose dangerous conditions on a legal activity don’t deserve to be on the books.