Coderre is gone, but so is Crazy Ass Anie Samson, finally ousted in 2017 after some 20 years as councilor. A real crazy uneducated woman, in full blown moral panic mode against the sex trafficking boogieman (and against pit buls - boogiedogs). In 2016, she was saying that several massage parlors had closed down and was admitting that the city's powers were limited.
Thing is, whether it's the city through administrative measures/bullying or the cops (like in the 90s) through the judicial, who closes down massage parlors, their owner reopen them somewhere else months later, and the girls find a job at some other salon.
Or they are pushed to leolist, etc., and work in conditions that are less safe.
Sex trafficking and sexual exploitation (of minors and adults) is a very serious issue, but the massage parlors are not where these thing happen in general.
I don't remember the Plante administration being very vocal about the sex trade but... My guess is that mayor Valerie Plante knows very well that
1) targeting massage parlors does very, very little in the fight against sexual exploitation
2) she understands women rights issues better and knows that targeting massage parlors and targeting sex workers (with C-36 for example) hurt women workers, make them less safe, place them at increased risk etc., whatever people think of sex work from a moral standpoint.
The Plante administration is almost at the 2 year mark, and so far they have been very good at looking at Coderre's mistakes and avoiding replicating them on moral panics / "think-of-the-children" non-issues: on pit bulls, on sex work, etc.
