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“Would you and your members and colleagues prefer me to back off exposing clients altogether, and if so why?” says the email. “I seek your help in answering these questions.”

Bedford, who led the legal battle that overturned Canada’s prostitution laws, threatened to name naughty politicians at a Senate hearing last month into C-36, the law the Conservative government is bringing in to make it illegal to buy sex.

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“There is a pattern where women are coming to an oil-rich province chasing the money, and we are seeing more and more of that,” Det. David Schening, with the Edmonton police’s vice unit, said Tuesday.

Participating in a nationwide undercover probe called Operation Northern Spotlight, Edmonton detectives contacted sex-trade workers by responding to advertisements on the Internet and then offered intervention and exit strategies instead of arresting them. A secondary goal was determining if they were being forced to work for somebody else.

“The objective is not just enforcement; first and foremost, it is the safety of these women, and then trying to see if we can identify their handlers,” Schening said. “No one acknowledged that was happening, but I saw a lot of reluctance and guarded answers.

“I believe there is an underlying reason why they are here.”

None of the sex-trade workers in Edmonton contacted as part of the investigation was underage, although police elsewhere found minors had been threatened with violence, extortion and drug dependency, among other forms of coercion. The youngest, a 12-year-old girl, was taken into protective custody in Winnipeg.