Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you, everyone.
Mr. MacDonald and I are pleased to be speaking to the honourable members of your committee about the Action Committee on Court Operations in Response to COVID-19.
As an executive legal officer at the Supreme Court of Canada, I am an ex-officio member of the action committee. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the co-chairs of the action committee, the Right Honourable Richard Wagner, Chief Justice of Canada, and the Honourable David Lametti, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, for inviting the Honourable Michael MacDonald and myself to talk to you about the work of our action committee, which has now been in place for over a year.
We are using this opportunity to applaud the wise initiative of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights to consider the impact of the pandemic on the justice system, so that fellow Canadians can continue to benefit from a system that protects their rights and their interests while ensuring their safety. It is actually this dual commitment—in other words, ensuring both access to justice and a safe health context to do so—that guides all of the action committee's work.
So I propose to speak briefly to you about the action committee's mandate and composition. I will then yield the floor to my colleague, Mr. MacDonald, who will discuss our work in terms of the pandemic's impact on legal activities.
The action committee was established in May 2020, shortly after the pandemic began. It acts as a national leadership body that helps courts and officials responsible for the administration of justice safely restore court operations across the country. The courts and officials have ensured to do their best to fulfil their judicial mandate, despite court houses having to close owing to the health crisis.
In addition to the Chief Justice and the Minister of Justice, the action committee has three members of the Canadian Judicial Council, as well as representatives of the Canadian Council of Chief Judges and the British Columbia Ministry of Attorney General—for the sake of coordination among the provinces, territories and the federal government—and the Public Health Agency of Canada.
The action committee also works with many stakeholders and collaborators. Among others, I'm thinking of the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health, heads of court administration and the Office of the Commissioner for Federal Judicial Affairs, which hosts on its website all the work produced by the action committee.
Bolstered by those partnerships, the action committee is a national consultative forum—and I emphasize its consultation mandate—for promoting non-prescriptive guidance and fostering communication, information sharing and collaboration between the executive and judiciary branches, which is no small matter. In fact, that is without a doubt one of the most positive lessons of the entire undertaking.
As its name suggests, the action committee mainly deals with operational issues that arise within the legal system owing to the pandemic. Its work extends to provincial, superior and appeal courts dealing with various areas of law, including criminal law, civil law and family law, as we know that the pandemic has had a sliding scale of repercussions. Not all bodies have suffered the same consequences. We will come back to this.
Mr. MacDonald and I would be pleased to answer your questions when the time comes. Without further ado, I yield the floor to him, so that he can talk to you about the specific work of the action committee likely to be of interest to you.
Thank you.