Terri-Jean Bedford brought her trademark riding crop Wednesday for her appearance before the Senate justice committee considering C-36, the new prostitution law.

The retired dominatrix seemed to make the Tories nervous. They should be nervous.

Bedford used to run an upscale “dungeon” in the Toronto suburb of Thornhill, called the Bondage Bungalow, where clients paid to have women hit them with riding crops.

In 1994, York Regional Police shut her down, seized two moving vans full of equipment and charged her with “keeping a common bawdy house.”

She fought them all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, which last year ruled unanimously in her favour, finding that our prostitution laws violated the charter rights of sex workers to “security of the person,” since the laws made it more difficult for them to protect themselves.

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