Thank you, Mr. Chair, and members of the committee, for extending this invitation. It's truly a great honour for our organization to be able to present before the committee today.
As the executive director of a small but mighty not-for-profit, I'm used to engaging in shameless self-promotion and donation requests, but today my goal is to give you some insight into how our organization operates, our successes, some solutions we have found with regard to access to justice for our clients, a few of the challenges we face, and some recommendations from our unique perspective.
Our clinic was founded by local immigration lawyer Lee Cohen in June 2000, in response to the ongoing lack of legal aid for people making refugee claims in Nova Scotia. Today, coming up on two decades, we still have no legal aid for immigration and refugee matters in the province.
We started, like many not-for-profits, humbly and informally out of coffee shops and living rooms, church basements, and tiny shared offices. Today we occupy a house in the north end of Halifax, which was donated to us by one of our volunteers and supporters. We're a grassroots, non-governmental community organization. We provide legal and settlement services to refugee claimants and for certain other risk-based and humanitarian immigration applications. We also engage in advocacy and education initiatives.
We are, you could say, a kind of a privately funded legal aid, but we have a unique model in that we are a volunteer-based organization. We rely on volunteers out of necessity but also by philosophy. It is the community's responsibility and privilege to help those fleeing persecution.
Our core volunteers are community lawyers who take on individual client files on a pro bono basis, and who, with the help of our staff and senior volunteer counsel, are mentored and trained to represent clients in front of the refugee protection division, as well as the refugee appeal division, the Federal Court, the immigration division, and occasionally other forums.
We also have a roster of volunteer interpreters, English- and French-language tutors, mental health counsellors, research assistants, community guides or buddies, and placement students and student interns in domains ranging from social work to political science to accounting to medicine and, of course, law.
We are funded by the Law Foundation of Nova Scotia and private donations, supplemented by in-house fundraising efforts. Our operating budget is almost always under $200,000 a year, and this year it is $167,000.
In Nova Scotia, as you might imagine, we do not see the numbers of refugee claimants seen in bigger centres in provinces such as Quebec or Ontario, but we consistently have 30 to 50 new clients a year, around 75% of whom are first-stage refugee claimants. So far for 2016-17, our success rate in front of the refugee protection division is 83.8%.
Representing refugee claimants is complex and delicate. There can be varying degrees of legal complexities in files, and individuals have other factors that need to be taken into account or addressed or worked around, including trauma, language and educational barriers, cultural differences, and proscriptions. Establishing a relationship of trust takes time and finesse. There's a finite amount of time to complete the requisite forms and story that are the basis of the refugee claim, as well as to gather and compile evidence to corroborate the claimant's fears in front of the refugee protection division, which, as many of you may know, is a quasi-judicial tribunal operating with a reverse-order questioning model.
One of our unique responses to the particularities of this hearing in front of the refugee protection division is our hearing preparation program through which, with the help of our volunteer-lawyer staff and other volunteers, we prepare clients to testify by holding a series of mock hearings. We do this because the refugee protection division hearing has very high stakes. The consequences of a wrong decision from the board can ultimately result in deportation, which can lead to persecution or even death.
We are confronted with and try to balance and address these needs and our limitations on a daily basis with unstable and insufficient funding, which necessitates staff fundraising alongside our direct-service provision to just sustain our programming. This is our reality. It is not unique to us but is the norm for many non-profits like ours across the country.
Our model developed rather organically out of this lack of access to justice. Over the years the lack of access to certain services has also created a robust settlement component within the clinic, as refugee claimants are ineligible for services offered by agencies and institutions that are IRCC-funded. Lack of social, medical, and settlement services oftentimes has a direct effect on a positive outcome in the legal sphere, so we approach our service provision holistically. A refugee claimant who's experiencing homelessness, who has untreated mental or physical health issues, or who has no money for food is not able to prepare their claim in adequate conditions.
Along with the multi-faceted needs of our clientele and the systemic inequities that refugee claimants experience in accessing basic services and justice, we are also responsible for finding, managing, and liaising with other entities, government and non-government, that our clients' situations give rise to or that they interact with. These intersectional situations require trusted and competent advocates or navigators, even when we are dealing with people who are allowed to access these services, as eligibility and true access are two different things.
I have an example that I hope will showcase this crucial role. Last year we took on the case of a woman who fled terrible partner violence from her husband, who was well connected politically in their country of origin. It's a country I can't even mention here, because she's still terrified and still living somewhat in hiding. She came to our organization pregnant with her fourth child, and left directly to the shelter, which we facilitated with the help of staff and volunteers. We then met with her in the shelter for several weeks, with the help of several of our volunteer interpreters—this was not the kind of claim that could be prepared in one sitting—going through the details of terrible memories that were very painful for her to bring up. We brought volunteer childminders so that we could prepare properly and also, obviously, spare the children the terrible details.
For many months we prepared her claim and her subsequent hearing; translated the documents she had; did research on human rights abuses and available protections in her country of origin; had to learn on the fly about emergency family law custody matters; liaised with her family lawyer, the police, and the crown for her ex-husband's criminal justice matter; communicated with the shelters where she was staying to keep them apprised of every stage of her immigration proceedings; managed Department of Community Services income assistance applications; spoke with child protective services; found and helped register the children in new schools; addressed medical needs, including prenatal needs and then newborn needs; and much more.
Happily, I can inform you that she and her children were granted refugee status and are now in the process of applying for permanent residence. But this is what it takes to be safe and to start to rebuild a life. All of this takes time, expertise, understanding, flexibility, and human capital.
This case study sets the stage for our first recommendation. We must acknowledge and value the role that non-profits and community organizations play in enabling access to justice, particularly for disadvantaged and marginalized groups. While robust legal representation is paramount to the success of a refugee claim, there are so many factors at play that the role of a guide or navigator is absolutely indispensable. People taking on these roles are undervalued, overworked, and underpaid—if they are paid at all. Our recommendation would be to examine carefully the role that these community advocates play and create or open federal funding streams to community and not-for-profit organizations who work with people accessing the justice system.
Another recommendation would be to leverage community organizations like ours for the powerful educational tools they are. As I mentioned, we have a huge roster of students from many disciplines, from social work to law, doing placements, practicums, internships, or service learning at our organization during the academic year and in the summertime. This model has the benefit of allowing us to have more power and serve our clients in ways in which a small organization simply cannot without this kind of help to do the following: take clients to medical appointments, call up landlords and set up apartment visits, do in-depth research of persecution against ethnic minorities in Ethiopia, calculate the federal and provincial portion of the HST paid for the last year by our organization, prepare a brief on the availability of mental health services in Guyana, and sift through 1F(a) exclusion case law for a member of the Afghan National Army. All of that is literally just what I can think of that's been done by our summer team over the last week.
I'm using these many examples to demonstrate not only how essential it is for us as a small organization to have this power and these skills and perspectives but also what an amazing opportunity it is for students to be able to learn about refugee claimants and non-profits and apply their theory to real-life situations. My recommendation here is to continue funding work opportunities for students—we have two Canada summer jobs students right now—and, more specifically, to create funding for law student graduates to be able to have paid articles at not-for-profit organizations. This would also help mitigate the articling crisis that many law schools are faced with now.
I have a recommendation on immigration detention. Obviously that's been in the news. I won't belabour the point. However, it is a huge access to justice issue, especially for provinces like ours, where immigration detainees are held without legal aid and where they are held in the general population of criminal facilities.
My last recommendation is around language as access to justice. Words themselves mean nothing to people who can't understand them. Funding interpreters so that this work is not downloaded to community organizations, family members, or communities, which is problematic in so many ways, is essential, as is opening up eligibility for federally funded English-language learning to refugee claimants.
I think the success rate at the moment is 55%. When you consider that more than half will be going on to live permanently in Canada and don't have access to the LINC program for years, in some cases it would be a win-win situation and increase people's sense of belonging and ability to join the labour force more quickly.
Thank you very much. I'm happy to elaborate, clarify, and answer your questions as well as speak to some other ideas and recommendations that I might have.
I have prepared my testimony in English, but I am ready to answer questions from members in French.
Thank you very much.