Laura Tamblyn Watts is a lawyer, advocate, researcher and media commentator. Her work focuses on law, aging, abuse, accessibility, law reform, governance and knowledge mobilization. She has previously served as Chief Public Policy Officer at CARP (Canadian Association of Retired Persons) for the past two years and as the National Director of the Canadian Centre for Elder Law. She currently teaches at the University of Toronto, where she is also a Fellow of the Institute for Lifecourse and Aging.
She is a past Chair of the Canadian Bar Association’s National Elder Law section, where she sits as a current Executive member. Laura is a Board member of the National Initiative for Care of the Elderly (NICE) network and facilitates the section on Law and Aging issues. She is an incoming member of the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC), and a member of the Investment Funds Institute of Canada’s (IFIC) committee on Seniors and Vulnerable Investors (IFIC). She is one of two Canadian representatives on the North American Securities Administrators Association (NAASA) committee on Vulnerable Investors and a continuing member of the Ontario Securities Commission’s Taskforce on Seniors. Laura is also a board member of PACE Independent Living, a housing and services nonprofit which provides attendant care to persons with physical differences. Laura created and oversaw CARP’s research portfolio and is actively involved with a number of National Centres of Excellence and a wide variety of current research initiatives, including the NICE Network, AGE-WELL and the Canadian Frailty Network. She helped to co-found Canada’s second low income seniors’ legal services centre, SeniorsFirst BC, located in Vancouver. She received her undergraduate honours degree in Political Science from Queen’s University and her law degree from the University of Victoria. She was called to the BC Bar in 1999.