Mr. Speaker, your Standing Committee on Government Operations is pleased to provide its Report on the Review of Bill 30, An Act to Amend the Human Rights Act, and commends it to the House.

Introduction

The Standing Committee on Government Operations ("the committee") is pleased to report on its review of Bill 30, An Act to Amend the Human Rights Act.

Bill 30, An Act to Amend the Human Rights Act, sponsored by the Department of Justice, has been referred to the Standing Committee on Government Operations for review. The bill proposes to:

• Consolidate the Office of the Human Rights Commission and the Office of the Director of Human Rights into a single agency called the Human Rights Commission;
• Clarify the public interest mandate of the commission and provide for the carriage of complaints at hearing by the commission, in recognition of this public interest mandate;
• Provide that restorative principles are to be applied to human rights protections and processes in the Northwest Territories;
• Make changes to the operation of the Human Rights Adjudication Panel, including giving adjudicators the ability to use practices and procedures for resolving complaints that are different from those in traditional adversarial processes;
• Add gender expression as a prohibited ground of discrimination to expand upon and clarify the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity for which discrimination is already prohibited under the act;
• Remove the offence and punishment provisions of the act, in recognition of the shift to a restorative process; and
• Bring the amendments into force annually over a three-year period, from 2019 to 2021.

Background

Comprehensive Review

The Northwest Territories' Human Rights Act received assent in 2002 and came into force in 2004.

In 2014, to mark the 10-year anniversary of the act's proclamation, the Human Rights Commission ("the commission") undertook a review of the human rights system in the Northwest Territories, which included a review of the system's governing legislation, the Human Rights Act. The commission contracted a team of experts, with an extensive background in the areas of Canadian constitutional and human rights legislation, to carry out the review.

The recommendations of the Comprehensive Review Team were set out in a report titled "Northwest Territories Human Rights Act Comprehensive Review: A review and analysis of human rights promotion and protection in the Northwest Territories," which was tabled in the Legislative Assembly on October 7, 2015.

The review report made a number of findings, including that:

• the complaint process is over-legalized, which creates a serious barrier for members of the public to access justice;
• the organizational structure is unnecessarily complex;
• the threshold for referral of complaints to the Human Rights Adjudication Panel is too low to allow the director to properly screen complaints;
• outreach and services to communities outside Yellowknife is limited; and
• the current focus on individual complaints makes it difficult to effect systemic and institutional changes.

The report recommended that:

• the commission adopt a restorative approach to all human rights work, encouraging all of those who are affected to be involved in resolving the issues giving rise to a complaint;
• the commission and the director's office be amalgamated into a single agency and that, in addition to the work that it already does with respect to the promotion of human rights, the commission be given responsibility for determining whether complaints should be dismissed or referred to the adjudication panel;
• the screening threshold be raised by amending the act to allow the commission to refer, for hearing by the adjudication panel, only those cases having merit and raising significant issues of discrimination; and
• the commission be empowered to identify and address systemic discrimination by moving from an adversarial and highly legalized process focusing on individual complaints to one that fosters a culture of diversity and inclusion by identifying and prioritizing pervasive issues of discrimination in the Northwest Territories.

The three agencies that currently make up the Human Rights Commission, the commission, the Office of the Director, and the adjudication panel, supported the overall findings of the review and developed a plan to implement the recommended changes. This work was captured in a report called "Moving Forward: Implementing the Recommendations of the 2015 Comprehensive Review of Human Rights in the NWT," which was also tabled in the Legislative Assembly on October 7, 2015.

Upon completion of the comprehensive review and the implementation plan, the Human Rights Commission began to make changes to move towards a more restorative human rights system in the Northwest Territories.

Through its reviews of the commission's annual reports, the standing committee has been kept apprised of this work, which has included training for staff on the principles of restorative justice. The commission has also hosted workshops and events, in concert with its partnership organizations, to promote restorative approaches. As this work has proceeded, so too has the work to develop amendments to the Northwest Territories' human rights legislation.

I will now turn the reading over to the honourable Member for Nunakput.