Thank you, Chair, and thank you, members. I appreciate the opportunity.
My name is Will Amos. I'm a lawyer and professor. I work with a charitable organization called Ecojustice. We have offices in Calgary, Vancouver, Ottawa, and Toronto.
We consider ourselves to be Canada's leading non-profit public interest environmental law organization. We use the law to protect and restore the environment. For 20 years our lawyers and scientists have represented, on a pro bono basis, community groups, citizens, first nations, municipalities—in effect any group that has as its goal to protect the environment. We hold governments and corporations accountable for the implementation of environmental laws in this country, both provincial and federal.
I'm here not only wearing my Ecojustice hat but also as the director of the Ecojustice environmental law clinic, which is a partnership between the University of Ottawa's faculty of law and Ecojustice. The faculty of law at U of O deemed a partnership with Ecojustice to be a strategic one because it wanted its law students to learn what it is that Ecojustice does. Students have been working with us in the preparation of these materials.
Although the timelines were short, and that's why we weren't able to get our materials translated in time, I do have four legal backgrounders that we would like to provide this committee. If it would be possible to have them translated so that the francophone committee members could read them, that would be great.
I will be very happy to answer questions in French. I apologize that I will not be making my presentation in French, but I am always very happy to communicate in that language.
It's difficult in the six minutes I now have left to communicate—