Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
The Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers—otherwise known as CARL, to make it easier—has about 350 members across Canada, consisting of lawyers and law professors, as well as law students. We have chapters in several universities across the country.
We focus on refugee protection as well as the human rights of migrants. Since our inception, we've been very active in the courts and in advocacy efforts before the government.
I want to emphasize the grave and huge differences between Quebec and Ontario in legal aid rates for refugees. My colleague, Maître Valois, is going to talk about the situation in Quebec. I'm going to focus on Ontario.
The main idea here is that there is a huge impact on the quality of representation, based on a tremendous difference between Quebec and Ontario in the legal aid tariffs. I believe the Quebec tariff for refugee claimants is something in the range of one-third of what it is in Ontario. We'll give you a brief synopsis of the impact that has had.
As an example, Legal Aid Ontario has a test fund, which has been used to fund court cases that create a precedent. This legal aid test fund money has been used to fund many of the main constitutional challenges in the field of refugee immigration law. It has been absolutely instrumental in enabling us to partake in complex cases, such as cases where individual lawyers who are working on legal aid tariffs could not possibly hope to mount a successful challenge, cases where you need expert affidavits and a tremendous amount of research.
For example, there's what's commonly known as “the doctors' case”, when we challenged the previous government's draconian cuts to health care for refugees and refugee claimants. That successful challenge was funded primarily by Legal Aid Ontario's test case fund.
The refugee law office, in particular, which is based in Toronto.... As a Montrealer, it's painful for me to have to say something positive about Toronto, but I'll overcome my—