*****OT******
April 5, 1999
Canada's Government Gets Skimpy
With Work Visas for Exotic Dancers
By MARK HEINZL
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
CLINTON, Ontario -- As immigration fights go, the one involving Loredana
Silion has become particularly boisterous -- indeed, the gloves are coming off.
Of course, if she wins, so will the clothes.
Ms. Silion says she doesn't want much -- a temporary visa to work in Canada
and the right to practice her art, which she deems a public service, in a nation
with a sudden shortage of, well, talent. Her art happens to be "exotic dancing."
The Canadian government, peeling her art of its euphemisms, calls the
22-year-old Ms. Silion a stripper and won't issue a work permit. Forced to
cool her heels in her hometown of Brasov, Romania, where she dances for the
equivalent of about $5 a night, she has sued in Canada's Federal Court to force
its hand.
Some of her supporters are livid. "There's no reason under any law" to deny
Ms. Silion a visa, says Sorin Cohn, a Toronto businessman, whose business
happens to be a strip club. "I'm not going to play dead over this."
Hitting Bottom at Tops
To understand why Ms. Silion's case has aroused such passion in people like
Mr. Cohn, venture out to Tops, an exotic-dancing bar plunked in the middle
of cornfields outside this small town of 3,200. A few hours after opening one
recent afternoon, not a single customer has come in. Red lights flash around
an empty stage. Two bored dancers slug quarters into a video game and turn
periodically to watch wrestling on television. "I wouldn't be surprised if these
places started closing down," says the bar manager, Peter Zembashi. A year
ago, the bar was busy with 20 or 30 customers on a typical afternoon, he says,
and crammed full at night. These days, even the night crowds have dwindled
to a few patrons.
These are troubled times for many strip joints across Canada -- those in
Ontario, its most populous province, in particular. The reason? A stripper
shortage. Bored customers, tired of seeing the same old faces week after
week, are staying away in droves.
"Look what I sold yesterday," complains Tops owner Nick Paelekis, pointing
to a stack of seven cases of empty beer bottles. In better days he sold 15 cases
a day. "Every day I hear the same complaints. 'When are you going to get
some more girls?' " he says, flipping through his dancer schedule for the next
few months. Names such as Jezebel, Christina and Lucy appear over and over.
"Bars are suffering" across the nation, agrees Toronto exotic-dancer agent
Alex Radulescu.
This suffering, in the eyes of agents and club owners, stems from a campaign,
begun quietly by the Canadian government more than a year ago, to bar
foreigners from the exotic-dance trade -- a trade, the dancers point out, to
which they were once eagerly welcomed. No one thinks the government is
guilty of protectionist sentiments toward home-grown talent; its concern
seems mainly to be a suspicion -- exaggerated, says the exotic-dance crowd --
that foreign strippers are sometimes abused by their employers, often overstay
their visas and may become involved in drugs and prostitution. The
government points to raids last year in Ontario of several strip clubs at which
a number of dancers and their male patrons were arrested on prostitution
charges.
Dancing Around the Issue?
The government never made a big deal of its anti-foreign-stripper policy; it's
just that agents who import strippers for the estimated 200 clubs that dot
Ontario woke up one day to realize that almost no new permits had been
issued after Jan. 1, 1998. By contrast, the government, in previous years, had
approved visas for about 400 women annually; most came from Eastern
Europe or other economically depressed countries, lured by the fact that
dancing in a Canadian strip club could net them more in a day than jobs back
home (assuming they could find one) paid in a month. For Diana Dragomir, a
Romanian who has been dancing in Canada for two years, much of the $2,000
she makes in a good week goes back to Romania to support her extended
family still living there, she says.
But the Canadian government says many foreign women don't always have a
clear idea that, though the money is good, exotic dancing isn't the world's
most wholesome profession, and that club owners and customers will
sometimes try to take advantage of them.
These are "young girls who don't speak the language and don't know what
they're getting into," says Lucie Bisson, an official with the Canadian
government's human-resources department.
For Romanian dancer Liliana Andrai, among the hundreds who have recently
been denied a six-month work visa, this is a patronizing attitude. "I don't
accept prostitution, and I will not accept drugs," Ms. Andrai fumes during a
recent phone interview from her home in Bucharest. Ms. Andrai says the
Canadian Embassy there has gone so far as to start asking applicants to prove
they are actually professional dancers by performing (clothed).
But she and others believe this is merely a government ruse to turn down all
applicants as unqualified. She says she danced for embassy officials and thinks
"they enjoyed it." But she later got notice, with no explanation, that her visa
request had been rejected. (A Canadian government spokesman wouldn't
comment on the particulars of Ms. Andrai's case but finds it "ridiculous" that
anyone would be asked to dance.)
Barely a Response
This would seem like an opportunity for Canadian dancers. But club owners
say the talent pool of young local women that the clubs used to draw on has
shrunk enormously in recent years. "A lot of Canadian girls want careers,
good jobs. They can't be bothered to strip," says Rick Hutt, a 23-year-old
strip-club manager working at Charlie T's in Toronto.
Indeed, desperate for new dancers last year, Mr. Cohn says he placed
newspaper ads seeking strippers in Halifax, Nova Scotia and St. John's,
Newfoundland. "I had three males call me -- not even one girl," he gripes.
Ron Storozuk, owner of J.R.'s Tavern in Chatham, Ontario, says he, too,
recently took out newspaper ads seeking exotic dancers. He got about eight
calls, but none showed up for an interview, he says.
Enter Ms. Silion, who actually has never set foot in Canada. But with the help
of the nascent Adult Entertainment Association of Canada, a group of club
owners and agents striving to "police this industry and uphold the highest
standards possible," she filed suit last October when her visa application was
turned down.
Among the supporting documents filed with the Federal Court in the case: a
letter from the Extassy nightclub in Brasov, where she now dances, endorsing
Ms. Silion as "serious, disciplined and devotedly attached to her work." The
government, however, deemed this insufficient reason to give Ms. Silion a
permit to dance at the Sunset Strip in Toronto, which had offered her a job.
Her case is set for trial this August.
Meanwhile, business at the Sunset Strip is lousy. On a recent night, only three
dancers are on duty and about eight men dot the mostly empty seats. Owner
Dario DeRose says he needs 10 dancers a night to bring in the crowds, but
newspaper ads and calls to agents have been fruitless. Moreover, there's
another reason to fret: Some of his dwindling number of Canadian dancers are
fleeing for greener pastures of their own.
"Ninety percent of the good-looking Canadian dancers are in the U.S.," says
club owner Mr. Cohn. For starters, the tips are better; beyond that, he says,
they can dance topless instead of nude. |
