I certainly am no lawyer and not even a Canadian but I think the procurement would have to be more direct vs just posting an ad or what Tbill is doing in ads Procure seems to imply getting two people directly together to have paid sex.

Procuring is hard to prove. John Lowman from the Fraiser Institute points, out even related to procurement of youth (child) prostitutes, "The general consensus of police and Crown sources is that the law prohibiting sexual procurement of youth is difficult to enforce because, to achieve a conviction, a youth who has been propositioned would have to testify against the accused (Federal-Provincial-Territorial Working Group on Prostitution, 1995; Lowman and Fraser, 1996: 105-6; Daum, 1997)."

Also while the law doesn't say there has to be a financial benefit to the procuring, others imply that is the intent. For example Prostitution in Canada by Stephanie Sturdy CRIM 101 paper:

Procuring
The purpose of the "procuring" and "living on the avails" provisions in the Criminal Code is to hinder third parties from making a profit from the prostitution of others. This includes directing potential customers to the services of a prostitute, and living fully or partly off the earnings of a prostitute. In most large cities, people in the service industry such as taxi drivers, bell-hops, bartenders, and hotel clerks tend to supplement their incomes by procuring (Gomme, 1993: 301).

Yet another writer, Kathleen Barry Female Sexual Slavery p.73. says:
"Together, pimping and procuring are perhaps the most ruthless displays of male power and sexual dominance...Procuring is a strategy, a tactic for acquiring women and turning them into prostitution; pimping keeps them there. Procuring today involves 'convincing' a woman to be a prostitute through cunning, fraud, and/or physical force, taking her against her will or knowledge and putting her into prostitution."

Like most of the prostitution laws in Canada the definition of procuring seems unclear. It was enacted along with the living of the avails law which was at the time directed towards the street prostitution problem. But there is no definition of prostitution or sex in the Canadian Criminal Code . So other than intercourse it is unclear what sex is in order to be convicted of prostitution. The Canadian Supreme Court has said that breast fondling must not be sex, since in a 1999 strip club case, that was not enough to make the club a bawdy house. In a famous B/D case against a well known "Bondage House" in Toronto, the trial court said that masturbation of clients and other activities in a B/D setting did NOT violate bawdy. But the Crown appealed and the Ontario Court of Appeals found it was a common bawdy house. After a six year court battle the owner was convicted but the only penalty was a $3000 fine.

So if the Canadian Courts have a hard time determining what sex is, procuring may be as much of a problem and especially if there is no money to the procurer. And the "victim" of the procuring would have to testify against the procurer.

In the U.S. with its far more aggressive laws against private escorts, most of our states/cities have laws against "promoting" which could be even worse than "procuring." But even in the big TBD board bust by both the FBI and local Florida police, there was no attempt to relate just general posts as being promoting. TBD did have potential legal problems was his frequent insisting on free sex to have escorts get higher rankings. But the case got tossed due to slowness of prosecution to name the confidential informants that were used since they didn't want the publicity and the case was tossed.

In Canada I would doubt the procure problem would apply to posts about a provider - too indirect it would seem. But again, I'm now lawyer and not even Canadian!

Update 2005
An agency owner plea bargained a procuring charge when an undercover cop looking for drug buys posed as a taxi driver and picked up the agency owner.  She had no drugs but taxi driver/cop discussed sexwork and being an escort saying he had a girlfriend interested in the business.  When agency owner answered questions regarding working for her, she was charged with procuring.  Her sentence was only community service.  The legal costs to fight the charge at trial was not worth the fight.

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