Madam Chair. The circumstance that injured workers can find themselves in if they have been through, I guess, the standard cycle of reviews and appeals before the WCB, is that they will find themselves without the resources or the ability to call on legal or medical help to help them advance their case. That is of course with the exception, Madam Chair, of having access to the NWT's legal aid system. We now are chronically under-resourced and understaffed in the legal aid area, Madam Chair, and so that means that an injured worker who may have very few or no alternatives other than to continue to work with or try and stay with the appeals or review process within the WCB, these workers have very little resources of their own and very darn few provided by our system, as I said, other than legal aid. So the idea of providing more resources to injured workers I think, as I say, once they have gone outside or beyond the regular scale of reviews and tribunals and appeals make some

sense, Madam Chair, because every time a worker and hopefully his lawyer, and in a lot of cases a legal aid lawyer, will make a case to the WCB or tribunal, but find themselves up against a veritable phalanx, Madam Chair, of other lawyers and medical professionals ready to take them on. It is very unfair. It is very lopsided, Madam Chair.

In making this recommendation, committee does not have the answers as to exactly how it could be put together, but we are proposing here -- and I can bring to the committee the cooperation, the concurrence of the workers' advisor, Mr. Baile, that he is prepared to assist with this -- it is how to look at how could we provide some degree of assistance to workers in areas medical or legal or perhaps others that would help them with their case and that would somehow square them up with the resources that the WCB already has at its disposal. I think this is only a fair type of resource that we should offer injured workers in giving them at least a fair degree of representation in this system. So it is there with the optimism, as I say, and the cooperation of the workers' advisor who we think is best equipped to really assess what the injured workers need, and to be able to put forward, you know, realistic and tangible ideas about how to meet those needs, Madam Chair.