Thank you for the invitation to appear before you today to talk a bit about the implications of repealing section 67 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.
I have to apologize, as I have a bit of a cold I got from my five-year-old son. And flying last night didn't help much.
There are maybe three things I really want to touch on in addressing a repeal of section 67 of the act. I just want to note, first of all, that I did some work for the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples in 2003 and a couple of reports—which I am not sure this committee is aware of—on the implications of repealing section 67.
What I did in that two-part report was to look at what would happen if section 67 were repealed. I also did a second report called “Past and Future Impacts of Repealing Section 67 of the Canadian Human Rights Act”. These look into the future, but also look at the past in terms of whether people can bring past actions once the amendment is made.
I didn't have the chance to find out from CAP what the copyright is on those reports, but I am sure they'd be happy to share them with you. If not, I'll send them along, if the committee is interested in seeing a little bit more of a detailed analysis of what the impact might be.
For the purposes of today, though, I want to concentrate on three issues primarily. One is the impact of the amendment in terms of what it would mean in the aboriginal community, in terms of people not getting access to justice.
I think it was around 2002 or 2003—I am not sure precisely—that I obtained some statistics from the Canadian Human Rights Commission on the number of individuals who have been denied access to redress of their discriminatory complaints, because of the existence of section 67. They estimated that about 100 individuals per year—and this is a conservative estimate—are turned away at the doors of the Human Rights Commission because of the existence of section 67.
We all know, however, that the tribunal, the commission, and the courts have interpreted 67 very narrowly. Yet the exception of people getting access to justice is probably larger than the impact of section 67. In the majority of cases, individuals somehow find a way to actually pursue their complaint through the commission, right?