The Court Challenges Program is down, but is it dead?
It died once before, just to be resurrected:
1993: Responding to widespread public concern about the Program's cancellation, Kim Campbell, then Minister of Justice, announced in August 1993, prior to the fall election, that the government would reinstate the Program if elected. The Liberal Party also promised in its election Red Book to reinstate the Program.
Wow, it must be nice to know that no matter which side won, your program was going to be funded.
The CCP is, of course, the taxpayer-funded program that was supposed to provide funds to those who felt their language or Charter rights were not being respected to pay for a court challenge.
Looks good on paper, but in practise, someone has to make a decision about whose complaints would be funded. Some people who felt they had a legitimate concern would not be funded.
One wonders if someone in the government had considered a Court Challenges Challenges Program to fund people who wanted to sue the Court Challenges Program for not funding their court challenges.
As far as I know, such a fund was never created, but in principle it highlights the fundamental problem with a public program that provides money to people to pursue private agendas. In the end, the money will go to those people whose agendas happen to promote the agenda of the government of the day:
Ottawa is spending millions to push gay rights and ''stringent'' feminist views of equality by funding legal cases, says a political scientist who has studied the court challenges program.
The money is supposed to go towards ''important court cases that advance language and equality rights guaranteed under Canada's Constitution.''
But Ian Brodie of the University of Western Ontario says the court challenges program has made up its mind which groups will get the cash.
''They're heavily funding the one side,'' he said Thursday. ''It happens to be the gay-rights side, the pro-pornography side, the feminist side and the abortion issue.''
Since 1999 the program has adopted a policy of absolute confidentiality, refusing to provide any information on the cases or groups it funds.
Brodie analysed the program prior to 1992 by obtaining records that were available under access to information laws. His study is being published in the June issue of the Canadian Journal of Political Science.
Interestingly, starting in 1992, the program arranged to have its work free from access to information requests, on the eve of the Liberal Party returning to power.
Actually this makes sense if the program stopped being about funding court challenges initiated by members of the public and instead became a slush fund for the Liberal Party to use to move money to those groups whose agendas promoted the Liberal-ization of Canada (and I mean "Liberal-ization" in the sense of making Canada a one-party state under the Liberal Party).
So special kudos to the Conservative Party and to Stephen Harper. They recognized that the CCP was not just a waste of money, or just poorly managed. They recognized that the CCP was not just something that could be fixed. They recognized that the CCP was inherently dangerous, that it could not be anything but a tool for a government to use to surreptitiously drive changes in the social landscape that align with a particular party's philosophy.
But reaching that understanding is not what earns the Conservative Party and to Stephen Harper much deserved praise. It is that they rejected the temptation to use that tool for themselves. They could have just as easily handed the CCP to the control of hand-picked bureaucrats who would have made sure that future funding went to groups looking for stronger property rights, for example, and any other Conservative-friendly issue you can imagine. But instead they recognized that the CCP is a corruptive influence. That whatever help the CCP could have provided in promoting conservatism was illusory, since it would have come at the cost of transparency and good governance. And ensuring transparency and good governance is far more important to protecting our Charter rights than anything the CCP could hope to accomplish.
For other posts on the demise of the CCP, check out these two lists of links: here and here.
If you want to register your approval of the cancellation of the CCP, or if you would like to see the CCP come back, get in touch with your MP.
