Thank you very much.
I appreciate you coming here today.
Our discussion on court challenges has been an interesting process for me because it's clarified a number of things. What began as an exercise in so-called accountability--our Treasury Board president said it was getting rid of programs that were wasteful and out of touch--has really become...it's clear there's a Trojan Horse aspect to this with the Conservative Party on an issue of what is the notion of rights. We're getting a very clear picture that what's being argued here now is that in Canada the notion of access, the equality of access, for rights is somehow at odds with individual rights.
I'd like to talk to you about your experience in terms of constitutional law. In our constitutional law we have individual rights, but we also have collective rights: francophone language rights, first nations rights under section 35. When those rights were proclaimed, they were not enacted upon. First nations had no more right to their section 35 rights after they were proclaimed in the Constitution than before; they had to fight for them in court. We had a number of very expensive cases to establish the nature of those rights.
I'd like to ask you, is it correct to say that the general jurisprudence in Canada is that we have a notion of collective rights alongside the notion of individual rights? Has that been the common practice in Canada?