Justice committee  Thank you for the question. The percentage varies from case to case in terms of the complexity of the case, but the funding is a subvention; it is a partial support, and other ways, sometimes through pro bono work, are found for the case to move forward. With regard to the data, in terms of—

Justice committee  Thank you for that. I have it in my brief on page five, which you'll have before you once it's translated. Let me just give you some numbers here in terms of total budget for this past year and total number of cases. There were $525,000 allocated to language rights and $1.5 million to equality rights this year.

Justice committee  Yes, it's covered in our annual report and we publish—

Justice committee  Please do. It's available on our website. Our brief gives you our website. We have bar charts and pie charts that show you province by province, issue by issue.

Justice committee  I'd be happy to do so, very briefly. I think the school board issue is a wonderful example that those who have a fulsome view of bringing diverse groups to the table need to address. Where, if one's dealing with a recalcitrant anglophone community in Saskatchewan—where I come from, to take an example that won't offend others—where, if not in the courts, will the francophone official minority community in Gravelbourg, for example, have the capacity to move forward on what their children have a right to—a language of instruction that is their own?

Justice committee  First, we don't fund lawyers; let's just put that on the table. We fund individual and group applicants. They retain lawyers. Those lawyers, as I have spoken to and as Ms. Buckley has spoken to, have a portion of their fee paid. It works like that. How is this funding done? It's done by a committee of experts who are themselves appointed by advisory panels to the program, at arm's length from the likes of me on the board of directors.

Justice committee  Thank you for the question. Constitutions are best understood as living trees. In my remarks, I cited the American constitution's Bill of Rights—200 years and growing. To my eye, there's no shortage of development at work in terms of litigation south of the border on the question of clarifying constitutional rights.

Justice committee  Yes, Mr. Chair. My name is Ken Norman. I'm the treasurer of the Court Challenges Program. I sit on the board of directors of the program as the representative of the Council of Canadian Law Deans. I have with me our executive director, Noël Badiou. Mr. Chair, honourable members, I want to talk first from our brief that's filed with you as to the purpose of the Court Challenges Program.