Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, I thank you for allowing me to speak today.
I'm the president of Canada Christian College. We're a 40-year-old institution training workers for the church in the city of Toronto. We have approximately 1,200 students. We've graduated over 4,500 over the last 40 years, most of whom are serving congregations right across the country of Canada.
Some 80% of our students are visible minorities, while 90% of our students are actual minorities. These new Canadians who are part of our great country of Canada have somehow been excluded from the court challenges program. What is their sin that has caused them to lose their status in this program? The sin is that they are pro-family, that they are pro-religion, and that they just simply do not fit the ideology of the court challenges program. This program appears to say that all Canadians are equal; however, some are more equal than others. Some are worthy of funding, some are not worthy of funding. Somehow, our people have been found to be less equal, and this has been decided purely upon ideological lines.
This court challenges program was founded for the purpose of clarifying equality rights in this country of Canada. It was not founded for the purpose of advancement of special interest groups in this country. However, according to the review, the report of the program directors themselves, the report that they put forward in the year 2003 states that it is for the advancement of equality of rights. We do not believe this is the purpose for the court challenges program. Therefore, it should not be funded by a government that is committed to equality.
We, of course, as Canadians, and as religious Canadians, are committed to fairness. We're committed to equality. We are committed to fair treatment right across the board—not that some are more equal than others, not that some people are attempting to restrict rights and some are attempting to advance rights. This court challenges program is saying exactly that. Furthermore, it's doing so with great conflict of interest.
Think of this. The government pays Canadian citizens to sue the government. We are the only country on earth that pays our citizens to sue ourselves. This is a tremendous conflict of interest, and it should therefore not be funded.
There's a further conflict of interest, and you've heard it come up several times already today. The advisory group is made up of people who receive the funding. These people who gain access to millions of dollars are the very people advising the court challenges program of where to put the money—organizations like Women's Legal and Education Action Fund, with over 140 cases themselves; organizations like Egale and others that you've heard of. They are funding challenges to our legal system so that people like Robin Sharpe can put forward the idea of equality, in that he should be equal in this country as a child pornographer who creates child pornography. How disgusting it is that our government would fund such a challenge? Yet for those of us who are pro-family, when we go and say we do not want these rights to be given to Robin Sharpe, it is then declared that we are restricting rights and we are therefore not allowed to have any funding to intervene on behalf of Canadians across this country.
Who pays this bill? Not you, not Parliament, but the taxpayers of this country. They pay the bill of the millions of dollars every year that go to this program. But that is the tip of the iceberg. After the millions of dollars are seeded into the program, court challenges begin, many of them frivolous, and then the government has to put forward millions of dollars to lawyers to defend the government's position against these challenges that it's paying for.
The reality is that people like me—clergy members, teachers, parents, and children—do not have equality of rights in the court challenges program. However, people who want to attack the rights of those like us in this country appear to be more equal than others. This court challenges program has nothing to do with rights, but everything to do with advancing an ideological agenda in which we, as parents, somehow are not included.
We are people of fairness. We do believe in equality. We do believe in rights. But somehow the court challenges program does not believe in our rights. Therefore, we ask that the Government of Canada cancel the funding to this program.
Thank you very much.