Justice committee  No. To clarify that as much as I can because I'm not a spokesperson for Nova Scotia Legal Aid, refugee claimants and other people without permanent residence or citizenship can access legal aid services in different domains, in family law and criminal law, if they are eligible fi

Justice committee  Instead of counsel leading our witness, the reverse order questioning that happens at the refugee protection division is the one board member now leading the witness. That can be problematic. It's hard for our volunteer lawyers to get used to it as well.

Justice committee  As I was saying, it's really on a case-by-case basis. We try to work from a very flexible and anti-oppressive standpoint. I think that's important. We obviously talk a lot about what I was saying, which is the holistic approach to service provision, whereby access to justice and

Justice committee  We're dealing mostly with refugee claimants as well as some other humanitarian applications and risk-based immigration applications. As for how those refugee claimants have entered, Halifax is a big university town, so we have some international students who have been here for

Justice committee  I think it can be a lot of things. I'm trying to think of examples. There are different ways that people have of remembering things. People in many cultures do not have this idea of dates that's so important to our culture and so important to a refugee claim. We've had refugee cl

Justice committee  Yes, I think they are. It might vary from province to province, and I can only speak about Nova Scotia and the experiences some of our clients have had there. Lack of cultural competence in government agencies and other organizations is a big reason people don't access the servic

Justice committee  More and more, I would say. I haven't had the chance to work with aboriginal people, but I've had the opportunity to work with the LGBTQ+ community. We've had cases of people from Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Uganda and around the world. We've had many refugee protection claims, which w

Justice committee  Yes, thank you. It's the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada's new guidelines on sexual orientation and gender identity and expression. The purpose of the training is to better explain the changes and barriers when it comes to the representation of the LGBTQ community.

Justice committee  I have a bit of the same reticence, I guess. As I was saying, we do all our refugee protection division hearings by video conference—not out of choice but because that was part of the legislative change in 2012. At the same time, we've used technology; we've used video conferenc

Justice committee  Yes. One of my other recommendations was to try to mitigate some of the damage that has been done to the reputations of refugee claimants over the past couple of years. Refugee claimants have been a very stigmatized group. I can see this first-hand with how they don't want to

Justice committee  Yes, I think that's absolutely.... Mr. Aylwin was talking about the recent complexities, in the past couple of years, with regard to immigration legislation and the intersectionalities. If, on the one hand, you have mandatory minimums of six months imposed and, on the other hand,

Justice committee  No, in terms of opening up legal aid to refugee and immigration matters, I know there has been discussion, but I'm not aware at what point the discussion is. I know there's going to be some federal funding for refugee representation. I'm not sure exactly what format it will take

Justice committee  No.

Justice committee  Not that I know of. We're a little bit out of the legal aid loop because of our particular kind of status as an organization.

Justice committee  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 s