Good afternoon, and thank you for the opportunity to address this committee.

My name is Michèle Biss. I'm the national director of the National Right to Housing Network, a broad-based civil society network of organizations and individuals who work to ensure that the government's human rights commitments, made under the National Housing Strategy Act, are meaningfully realized.

The NRHN has engaged in United Nations reviews, including the 2022 review by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the 2023 universal periodic review by the Human Rights Council and the most recent 2024 review by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women.

We have had the opportunity to engage with the team at Canadian Heritage and to attend meetings, like the continuing committee of officials on human rights and meetings of the federal, provincial and territorial ministers responsible for human rights. I have sat on the other side of Zoom calls and across in-person tables while government representatives read the same speaking notes that are conveyed in press releases instead of meaningfully engaging on human rights accountability with civil society representatives and rights holders. In this meeting, I would most like to convey the deep sense of frustration, across civil society organizations, that Canada is not taking its human rights accountability mechanisms seriously and that there has been no improvement since this committee wrote its 2010 report.

I want to acknowledge the efforts of staff teams at Canadian Heritage who have created processes, like the director general, rights group, and the June CCOHR presentation of a civil society engagement strategy. The challenge is that, despite what I believe are very good intentions on behalf of the staff at Canadian Heritage, they are under-resourced, and civil society has not been meaningfully integrated into these meetings.

I am increasingly hearing from civil society colleagues that human rights engagement meetings lack authentic human rights practices and feel like a waste of resources for organizations that already have limited capacity. I would like to amplify my colleagues' recommendations to call on federal, provincial and territorial governments to implement and adopt a national framework for international human rights implementation.

I also echo the call for further witnesses to be called, from government to rights holders with lived experience of human rights violations. As my colleagues will state, we cannot position ourselves as champions of human rights on the global stage if we do not lead by example at home.

I am coming to you also with deep knowledge of Canada's first domestic implementation mechanism of an economic and social right, through the National Housing Strategy Act, which has some strong—