Thank you.
Thank you for inviting Canada Without Poverty to appear at this important study on access to justice. CWP is a federally incorporated, charitable organization dedicated to the elimination of poverty in Canada. Since our inception in 1971 as the National Anti-Poverty Organization, we have been governed by people with direct, lived experience of poverty, whether in childhood or as adults. This lived experience of poverty informs all aspects of our work.
I am the president of the board of directors, and although I'm an educated professional, I've lived most of my life in poverty. I have first-hand experience of the substantial barriers in access to justice for the one in seven people in Canada who are living in poverty. I truly believe that if the justice system were accessible, I would not have endured 34 years of poverty. I'm joined in my comments by Michèle Biss, Canada Without Poverty's legal education and outreach coordinator and human rights lawyer.
One of the principal barriers in accessing the justice system for people living in poverty is the lack of availability of financial resources. The cost of legal advice, administrative fees, and other collateral costs directly restrict those living in poverty from accessing legal mechanisms. In communities where legal aid is not available, primarily in civil and administrative matters, the most marginalized who are living in poverty are often denied justice. For example, as noted by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in their 2006 concluding observations, cuts in British Columbia for civil legal aid in family law services disproportionately affect women. Instead of remedying this service gap, B.C. took further measures to eliminate all funding for such poverty law matters as housing and eviction, welfare, disability pensions, and debt.
We live in an era when social protections for the most vulnerable are under near-constant threat. One of the underlying causes of the constant mining of such programs is attitudinal. It's attitude. In Canada, despite the obvious systemic nature of poverty, there remains a dominant discourse that stigmatizes poor people as undeserving and lazy. As a result, any provision of services, no matter how paltry, is deemed an act of benevolence on the part of governments, rather than governments meeting their human rights obligations to ensure the active participation in democracy of people who are poor.
The entrenched stigma associated with living in poverty is often internalized, and can result in a fear of reprisal and further prejudice, particularly when people are trying to claim their legal rights. This fear of asserting one's rights through the justice system is exacerbated by the growing trend of aggressive litigation by the government, which asserts that rights claims of this population should not be heard. For example, in the Tanudjaja v. Attorney General case, when four homeless individuals attempted to assert their right to housing in the courts, the government respondent filed a motion labelling this exercise of rights as frivolous and vexatious. This left homeless people with no recourse to claim their basic human rights, and occurred without any review of 9,000 pages of expert evidence filed by the applicants.
The court challenges program validated the legitimacy of poor people as rights holders. It acted as a mechanism to combat discriminatory stereotypes of poor people by providing access to justice.
My colleague Michèle will now take over.