Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, ladies and gentlemen members. I was informed, roughly a week or 10 days ago, that I was going to speak on this subject today. I would have liked to have a little more time to prepare what I'm going to say today.
As I mentioned previously, our foundation arose in 2002 in support of constitutional litigation launched by James Robinson in British Columbia, who challenged and continues to challenge the Nisga'a agreement as violating his equality rights and other constitutional rights as a Canadian. You might be interested, or perhaps surprised, to learn that our foundation actually applied to the court challenges program for funding in 2003. That was before I came on board as executive director. I don't know if I would have made the same decision or not, but that's irrelevant. In 2003 we applied for funding. We said we'd like some money to support this court challenge of Nisga'a Indian Chief Robinson, Sga-inisim Simaugit, to pursue his section 15 equality rights. We were denied funding by the court challenges program because our particular litigation did not fit the particular ideology and particular vision of the court challenges program.
In spite of that denial, we were still able to raise money from Canadians who support Chief Mountain's challenge, and this litigation is still ongoing because Canadians have been persuaded of the justice of Chief Mountain's cause, and they have voluntarily contributed toward that lawsuit. I've heard the argument that the court challenges program should receive tax dollars because it promotes justice by assisting groups and individuals in pursuing justice in the courts. This argument would hold water if everybody agreed on what justice is.
However, that's not the case. Various visions of justice are being expressed here today. I see representatives of the four political parties. Each political party has its own vision of justice. We don't all agree on what justice is. In fact, we know that this question was debated at the time of Plato and at the time his work The Republic first appeared.
Since there's no consensus on what justice is, it isn't accurate to say that this program helps people defend justice. That's simply not true. It is used to help people defend a certain vision of justice. After listening to Mr. Williamson's list, some people in this room and outside of it could agree with some, most or all the cases that were mentioned. However, there are people in this room and elsewhere in the country who do not at all share that vision of justice.
For example, if you consider the notion of equality, for some people equality means equality of opportunity or equality before the law, with the differing outcomes, different results, that will occur. For other people, equality means not equality of opportunity but equality of condition or substantive equality, which I take to be the position of the court challenges program, although I don't purport to speak for them. This is an example. There can be very sincerely held and different views as to what equality is, and so my central point is that the court challenges program does not fund justice. It funds one particular vision of justice. The court challenges program does not fund equality. It funds one particular vision of equality. The court challenges program doesn't fund language rights. It funds one particular vision of how language rights should be implemented. It is wrong, morally, politically, and ethically for the federal government to force all Canadians to pay with their tax dollars for the promotion of one particular view of justice that some people agree with and others do not.
Chief Mountain has persisted and persevered in his litigation without any funding from the court challenges program since the statement of claim was filed in 2000 and since 2003, when we were denied funding. Other individuals and groups should do likewise.