Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here today.

The Association of Justice Counsel, or the AJC, is the bargaining agent for approximately 2,600 lawyers who are employed by the Government of Canada.

I was pleased to hear the President of the Treasury Board acknowledge to you last Monday that Canada's public service is world class. Our members work very hard on a daily basis to uphold the rule of law in Canada.

As your legislative drafters, which we are, we've helped to ensure that the close to 300 bills that are in the House this session steer true. We are also constitutional experts. We're subject matter experts on a number of complex and important matters, like first nations land claims, residential schools, immigration, criminal law, and refugee and extradition law. Your civil litigators are currently defending Canada against roughly $1.2 trillion in lawsuits. We work to protect public safety, and we do that all the while ensuring respect for human rights.

I have been a prosecutor for more than 20 years. Together with my colleagues in the Public Prosecution Service of Canada, I prosecute acts of terrorism, or I prosecute organized crime syndicates, human traffickers, drug traffickers, and environmental polluters. This is just some of the valuable work that my members do for Canadians every day.

The AJC's membership is very interested in constitutional issues, and also very concerned about the rule of law. We are particularly motivated to ensure that all workers throughout Canada are treated fairly and lawfully.

With that background, I have three points that I'd like make before this committee today, if time allows: first that the status quo is unlawful; second, that it has already caused considerable harm; and third, it will continue to do so until it is changed.

We wholeheartedly agree with Minister Brison's concession before this committee that the existing law is unconstitutional. We have been voicing our concerns since November 2013. I see that Mr. Engelmann is here, who was counsel on the charter challenges brought by the unions such as the AJC to the existing legislation.

We also fully agree with the honourable member from Brampton Centre, Mr. Ramesh Sangha, who raised on Monday the importance of the law's compliance with the Saskatchewan labour decision of the Supreme Court of Canada. I believe that the alliance has a suggestion or two on how the bill should be amended to comply with that jurisprudence, and the AJC agrees with that perspective.

Mr. Brison mentioned that 23 out of 27 unions have signed deals, and we are one of the unions that did not. Our collective agreement expired in May 2014, and we declared an impasse in December of 2016. On May 9, which is a little more than two weeks away, we will have gone four years without a collective agreement. I hope you agree with me that this is really unacceptable. At least part of the delay was directly attributable to the state of this law.

Minister Brison told you that he agreed to a new approach after taking office, and I believe it was Ms. Hassan who talked about certain flexibilities that were adapted. These flexibilities needed to be worked out. In sum, the parties needed to agree on finding a fair framework that could operate inside what we believe to be an unconstitutional law. That took time. During that time, our terms and conditions of employment were frozen.

What happened? On Monday, this committee discussed the importance of hiring youth. I think some of those concerns were raised by one of the honourable members from British Columbia, where Vancouver has the distinction of having the most unaffordable housing in all of North America. What has happened to us is that in the last few years, the Department of Justice, where most of my members work, has lost almost 50% of its junior lawyers in the province of British Columbia. That was in two years. The word is out among law students, who carry very sizable student debt when they start, that the federal government is an unaffordable place to develop one's career, and they're heading to greener pastures.

You can imagine how you operate an office without 50% of your junior staff. It's having a crippling effect on the effective delivery of legal services, and it is also having a devastating impact on the folks who are left. They are struggling to cope in what has colloquially become known as “the graveyard”.

Updating our working conditions is therefore very urgent. We urge you to pass this bill as quickly as possible to help reduce future delays. No one should have to wait four years for their new collective agreement to be signed.

I have one minute, so let me talk about the harmful effects of not allowing groups like the AJC to have disputes with the employer resolved at arbitration.

The current law forces us out on strike, and lawyers are loath to strike. We take our professional, moral, and ethical responsibilities very seriously, and we are keenly aware of the importance of public trust in the administration of justice.

I can't imagine how I would tell a victim of human trafficking that a looming strike might affect the timing and the manner of the prosecution of the case in which she is testifying as a witness. Testifying about something intensely personal like this is unimaginably stressful, and the uncertainty of not knowing who would be taking you through your testimony or whether the trial that you've spent months mentally preparing for is now in jeopardy of not proceeding would be, in my opinion, an incredible burden to place on someone who's already suffered enough.

The Supreme Court of Canada's decision in Jordan, which requires trials to be completed within prescribed time frames, places additional pressure on us.

We would, in these circumstances, choose arbitration, but it was taken away. If confronted with workplace issues that seriously compromise our ability to meet our professional obligations, that undermine our ability to meet the demands of the justice system, or that compromise our mental health, like workloads or inadequate resources, these issues need to be addressed in a way that doesn't cause any further harm.

We ask you to ensure that by restoring our recourse to binding arbitration.

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