Thank you, Chair.
Honourable members, thank you for inviting us to appear today on your deliberations on Bill C-41.
My name is Martin Fischer. I'm the head of policy for World Vision Canada, and I'm joined by my colleague, Amy Avis, who's the chief of emergency management at the Canadian Red Cross and also a much more qualified lawyer than I will ever try to be.
We're joining you from Ottawa, which is on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe people.
Our organizations are both members, as Usama has mentioned, of the #AidForAfghanistan coalition, a diverse group of Canadian humanitarian aid, human rights and women's rights organizations that have operated in Afghanistan for decades. Today we're speaking to a submission that was jointly prepared by eight organizations.
I want to emphasize that over the past months, and in fact longer than a year, we've closely engaged with parliamentarians from all parties and many of you around a table, as well as officials and ministerial staff from many departments, and that dialogue has been exceedingly constructive throughout. Thank you for that.
Before Amy details some of the legal considerations of our submission, I want to stress three points regarding Bill C-41.
First, as you progress through these deliberations, you'll hear, as you have, a spectrum of views on Bill C-41. We believe that with some fine tuning, it is a critical step forward in a longer-term journey to ensure that Canadian humanitarian organizations as well as those delivering other services in these difficult contexts can operate in a neutral, impartial and independent manner in the most difficult and exceptional circumstances.
Second, Bill C-41 applies to a very narrow, exceptional set of contexts in which interaction with the terrorist group's exercise of control over territory is wholly unavoidable.
Third, while Bill C-41 is not specific to just Afghanistan, it can enable us to resume work in that particularly challenging context, hopefully in the very short term. We cannot lose sight of the severity of the humanitarian crisis there and the obligations that Canada and Canadians have to help.
I'd like to turn it over to Amy now. She will outline some of our legal perspectives and recommendations contained in this submission.