Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The committee has another motion that is extraneous to the clause by clause. It did not really fit specifically into any of the clauses, but we felt it was important. One of the things that we heard from a number of presenters on was the fact that there needs to be equal access for those who need to bring a complaint forward to the commission. We did allow for, in this legislation, allow for the commission to appoint an independent advocate where they see fit. Initially, our committee felt that would be adequate and we did not contemplate this process hopefully being an overly legalistic process, but I guess we can never have any assurances of that, Mr. Chairman. In other jurisdictions, it does seem that when you go to the adjudication panel, it is legalistic and most people do expect that they will have legal representation with them and in fact seem to need that, Mr. Chairman.

Our concern was that not everybody can afford counsel, not everybody can afford legal representation, and we thought that it would be a good idea for our government to look at our legal aid system to see if the current legal aid band-aid could be expanded to allow for human rights complaints. Currently, it does not contemplate that, Mr. Chairman. I guess obviously because we do not have a Human Rights Act. We felt that this was something that the government needed to explore to ensure that everybody had access to this process, regardless of your income level.

Therefore, Mr. Chairman,