Thank you for the opportunity, Chair and members. It's a pleasure to be here.
The issue of northern development is one that is a massive challenge to civil society because not only are many “southern” environmental groups not really present in the north—there are some who are—but there are also suspicions not just from the perspective of their interests in northern development or their disinterest as the perception may be, and not just vis-à-vis industry but also from with communities who live in the north. There is a lot of work that organizations like Ecojustice have to do in order to build trust with communities up north so that there is an understanding that in engaging in discussions around northern development the perspective of the vast majority of non-profit environmental groups is not one of “No, no, no” and not one of “Let's add process. Let's put sticks in the spokes”. It's actually a much more responsible one and requires dialogue.
I'd like to give you a perspective on where Ecojustice sits in the spectrum of this dialogue and then articulate a bit more clearly where our particular interests in northern development have been most expressed.
Ecojustice is Canada's leading public interest environmental organization. We have offices in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, and Ottawa. We have 17 lawyers. Our operating revenues annually are roughly $5 million. So one can tell that, while we're a substantial organization in the grand scheme of things, if Canada's largest public interest environmental law organization has a $5 million budget and we're dealing with projects that are upwards of $1 billion, we're small players in a giant pool. We understand that we have lots of work to do. We have to choose very carefully which projects we engage in and which issues we engage in, particularly in the north, where there are so many projects that are coming online in the very near future.
Ecojustice does two-thirds of its work litigating, taking on precedent-setting cases. We're before the Supreme Court regularly, but we don't only work in the area of litigation. We also do a significant amount of law reform work, so we were key players in the environmental movement's analysis of Bill C-38. It's our role to communicate the environmental community's perspectives on legal developments when the federal government engages in important transformations of the federal environmental governance regime. I'll actually keep my comments around Bill C-38 to a minimum. They do have impacts in the north.