Kristen is a Senior Director in the Library of Parliament’s Parliamentary Information and Research Service (PIRS). She graduated from the Western University Law School in 1987, having served two years as a Director of Community Legal Services. Kristen joined the NAWL Steering Committee while in law school, and continued in that role as she articled and was called to the bar in Ottawa. After a short period of private practice in family law with the Ottawa office of a national law firm, she joined the Library of Parliament in 1990. Starting with the organization as an analyst working in a wide variety of areas of law and policy and serving a number of parliamentary committees, Kristen joined the Library’s management team in 2008 and has been an executive since 2010.

Michelle Flaherty is an experienced mediator, arbitrator, and workplace investigator specializing in labour, employment, and human rights matters. She is fully bilingual in English and French.

Michelle graduated summa cum laude from the University of Ottawa. After clerking with Justice L’Heureux-Dubé of the Supreme Court of Canada in 1999–2000, Michelle entered into private practice. A member of the Law Society of Upper Canada since 2001, Michelle has extensive professional experience practicing labour law, administrative law, human rights, and constitutional law. During the course of her career, she has acted for both unions and employers.

From 2012 to 2018, Michelle was an Associate professor of law at the University of Ottawa, where she taught labour law, human rights, administrative law, and alternative dispute resolution.

Michelle is on the Ontario Minister of Labour’s List of Approved Arbitrators and is an arbitrator with the Grievance Settlement Board. Michelle served as a Vice-chair and a member of the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario from 2008 to 2018. She is a member of the Ontario Labour-Management Arbitrators’ Association and the Law Society of Upper Canada.

Michelle was inducted into the University of Ottawa Common Law Honours Society for her service to the law school and the profession. In 2011, she was named one of Bishop’s University’s Top 10 after 10 graduates.

Lorena Sekwan Fontaine is Cree-Anishnaabe and a member of the Sagkeeng First Nation in Manitoba, Canada. She is the Indigenous Academic Lead, co-director of a new Indigenous languages program and an Associate Professor in the Department of Human Rights at the University of Winnipeg. Her research includes linguicide, the legacy of the residential schools and Indigenous language rights.

Dr. Fontaine has taught for the First Nations University of Canada and the School of Public Policy Graduate Program at Queens University. She has spoken nationally and internationally and has authored articles on residential school issues and Indigenous language rights in Canada. Her PhD research was presented in a CBC documentary entitled “Undoing Linguicide.” She has also worked with the Assembly of First Nations as an advisor on Indigenous languages and linguistic rights.

Since 2003, Dr. Fontaine has been an advocate for Indigenous Residential School Survivors as well as their descendants. She has been involved with a Digital Storytelling project on the Intergenerational Legacy of the Residential Schools. She was a task force member and contributor to the Assembly of First Nation’s Report on Canada’s Dispute Resolution Plan to compensate for abuses in Indian Residential Schools. Dr. Fontaine also acted as a legal consultant to the Toronto law firm Thomson, Rogers in a National Class Action on Indigenous Residential schools. Recently, she was a co-organizer of an educational forum on the legacy of the residential schools and the Holocaust with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Dr. Fontaine was an Equality Rights Panel member for the Court Challenges Program and a National Steering Committee Member for the National Association of Women and the Law. She has also been involved with the Women’s Legal Education and Action fund as a board member and subcommittee member.

Martha is a Professor of constitutional law at the University of Ottawa where she has taught in the French Common Law program since 1988. She publishes and lectures extensively on social and economic rights, equality and the Canadian Charter. She is regularly involved in lobbying, continuing judicial and legal education, and litigation in these areas, including as counsel for the Charter Committee on Poverty Issues, LEAF, and other interveners in Charter test cases at the trial, appellate and Supreme Court levels.

She was a long-time editor of the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law/Revue femmes et droit, a past member of LEAF’s National Legal Committee and Board of Directors, a former member of the Board of Directors of the Canadian Health Coalition, a member of the board of the Social Rights Advocacy Centre and a member of the Association des juristes d’expression française de l’Ontario. From 1999-2004, she sat on the Equality Rights Panel of the Court Challenges Program of Canada; from 2007-2011, she held the University of Ottawa’s Shirley E. Greenberg Chair for Women and the Legal Profession; and, from 2004-2015, she was the academic lead for two $1,000,000 SSHRC-funded Community-University Research Alliance projects aimed at improving socio-economic rights accountability. In 1996, she received CRIAW’s Marion Porter Prize; in 2007, she was awarded the Law Society of Ontario Medal; in 2015, she was the recipient of the Canadian Bar Association’s Touchstone Award in recognition of her efforts to advance equality, and; in 2017, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Most recently Martha was granted the David Walter Mundell Medal for Legal Writing, by the Attorney General of Ontario (2018), and the Canadian Health Coalition’s Guardian of Public Health Care Award (Academic) (2019).

Martha has been on the NAWL National Steering Committee since 2007 and has acted as its’ co-chair 2012-2020. Martha was the Chair of the 2020-2021 National Steering Committee.

Cheryl is the Executive Director of the David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto. She was called to the Ontario Bar in 1987 and completed her M.S.W. at University of Toronto in 1991. She practised at the legal clinic Justice for Children and Youth from 1991 to 2008 where she appeared at all levels of court and various administrative tribunals on behalf of young people. There she also led the clinic’s Charter litigation including the challenge to the corporal punishment defence in the Criminal Code [Canadian Foundation for Children, Youth and the Law v. Canada (2004)], the striking down of the reverse onus sections of the Youth Criminal Justice Act for adult sentencing [R. v. D.B. (2008)], and an intervention involving the right of a capable adolescent to consent to her own medical treatment [A.C. v. Manitoba Child and Family Services (2009)].

As Executive Director of the Asper Centre, she has represented the Centre at the Supreme Court of Canada in R. v. Conway, R v. Barton, R. v. Kokopenace and the jury vetting appeals [R v Emms, R v Davey, R v Yumnu (2012)], as well as in the Polygamy Reference case at the B.C. Supreme Court and Tanudjaja v Canada (Attorney General) at the Ontario Court of Appeal. She is the past Chair of the Ontario Bar Association, Constitutional, Civil Liberties and Human Rights Section and has served on the CBA National Constitutional and Human Rights Law and Child and Youth Law Sections executive. From 2018 to 2020 she served on the Child and Family Services Review Board and the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario and continues to serve on the Steering Committee of the National Association of Women and the Law (NAWL). In 2019, Cheryl was awarded the Law Society Medal by the Law Society of Ontario for her contributions to the legal profession.

She teaches a Constitutional Advocacy clinic and Child and Youth Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto.