Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It's our pleasure to be here.
REAL Women has been involved with the court challenges problem, or I would say uninvolved, because we have been excluded totally from it. We have tried for years to get some sort of funding and some sort of recognition. Because we're not ideologically in tune with the court challenges program, we have always been denied funding.
We have grave concerns about the operation of the organization. To us, it is an example of government corruption and taxpayer abuse. The program does not report to Parliament, nor does the Access to Information Act apply to it. The consequence of this is that the administrators of the program have been able to do whatever they like, whenever they like.
For example, the mandate says it must be for disadvantaged groups, it must be on legal merit, and it must be for equality. Those were never defined, so the administrators of the program have quite happily defined it to suit their own private interests. I can give you an example. I understand you have a copy of our brief. Page 2 gives you some examples of the funding. For example, in 1992, a Toronto Bay Street lawyer, Elizabeth Symes, who was one of the founders of the feminist legal arm called LEAF, received funding so she could get a tax deduction for her nanny. It's who you are and your connection to the feminist movement and other special interest groups that determines whether you get funding.
In 1995, the CCP gave $5,000 to a social worker in Saskatoon to see whether she could build a case to remove section 43 from the Criminal Code. Section 43 allows parents and teachers to discipline their children if it's reasonable under the circumstances. After she did her research for $5,000, the CCP then gave money for another special interest group to go through three levels of courts to try to remove section 43. REAL Women was without any funding. In order to protect parents, we had to go through the three courts without a penny from any other group.
A so-called disadvantaged group is CUPE, the Canadian Union of Public Employees. They're very wealthy, because of course they have compulsory union dues. They received money for two cases on which REAL Women had to intervene out of their own pockets, both of them dealing with homosexual benefits and rights. We were protecting traditional family, and of course we were ignored by the court challenges program.
We were particularly displeased by the fact that the court challenges program, since it began, has been funding a feminist group, LEAF, Legal and Education Action Fund, on the grounds that they were going to argue for the equality of women. Let me tell you, LEAF does not represent women; it represents a special interest group of feminists only. The point is that nobody can represent women. We're as diverse as men. Yet they have been funded by the CCP for over 140 cases. It's always allegedly on behalf of “women”, but in fact it's on behalf of a feminist ideology only.
I might say that NAWL, the former speaker, also does not represent women. For some of the cases she outlined...there's no way a majority of Canadian women will support their arguments before the court--one or two, yes, but the vast majority were extremist, feminist, ideological cases. It was using judicial fiat to get around Parliament, which should be dealing with the decisions. Instead, with CCP funding, radical feminists were in fact funded to do an end run around Parliament on many, many issues.
We've found there's no equality of access whatever to the CCP, and we're prime examples of it. For example, to call LEAF, which has 140 cases funded, a disadvantaged group is amazing. We've found under the Access to Information Act that between 1985 and 1989, LEAF received over $800,000 from the Status of Women. It received $1 million from Ian Scott, the then Attorney General of Ontario. It received over $900,000 between 1992 and 2002. Yet our organization, which is funded only by our members and donations, has a grand total budget of $120,000 a year. We are certainly disadvantaged, but we've never been able to break through the court challenges program because we're not ideologically in keeping with those administering the program.
The CCP is very discriminatory. In fact, it's so ironic that an organization that is supposed to support fairness and equality in Canada is truly one of the most discriminatory, unequal, and unfair agencies we have in the Canadian government today. Our organization is a prime example of one that has experienced straight-on discrimination from the CCP. On page 6 of our brief we give you examples of three cases where we applied and they told us our views did not support equality. But we have equality in our objects of incorporation. We have it in our name. REAL Women stands for realistic, equal, and active for life. We all believe in equality as women, but we don't have the feminists' interpretation of equality; therefore, we've suffered very bitterly from discrimination at the hands of this court challenges program.
Every time we've applied for grants we've been told that we don't support equality. It's always LEAF and other feminist organizations that get the funding because only they apparently understand equality. But other women, who are the vast majority, are totally ignored because we obviously are not informed.
I am a lawyer and I've been to court many times. REAL Women has intervened in the Supreme Court of Canada over the years approximately 12 times, funded out of our own pockets, on issues for which LEAF, NAWL, and the homosexual organizations have all been funded.
It is a concern to us that the court challenges program has been used as a way to change the social values of this country by funding only one side of an issue, and there is no broad openness to others. To have other groups, such as the woman who just spoke from NAWL, talk about equality of access is truly very offensive to those of us who have had to go to court and pay out of our own pockets.
The homosexual activists in Canada, Egale, said in their own newspaper on October 19, “No group has benefited more from Court Challenges funding than the queer community”, which the column thanks. It said that money from the court challenges program helped Egale win equal marriage rights through the courts in B.C., Ontario, and Quebec.
They have been funded, whereas REAL Women, struggling to protect the traditional understanding of mother, father, and children, have had to pay through the courts again. We've tried to protect traditional values. We've tried to protect the laws that Parliament and the legislatures have passed. These groups that do not agree with them have used the money to usurp the laws and have their own objectives and ideology take over our system of government.
It's significant to us that the traditional definition of family—defined as mother, father, and children—has been severely impacted by these cases, funded by the court challenges program. It is now beyond dispute that children thrive best in opposite-sex family environments, where they learn gender identity and sexual expectations from the biological parents. These children thrive best academically, financially, emotionally, psychologically, and behaviourally, and we've documented all that.
But instead, what has happened is that these extremist groups have used the courts with court challenge money to usurp what is a concern for children.
For example, France's National Assembly said in January 2006 that they cannot accept same-sex marriage because of the effect on children. In July 2006, the New York State Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., also rejected same-sex marriage.
But instead, you have the courts taking the lead in trying to tell us that it's adults' rights to totally ignore the rights of children. The question to be addressed is why does the Canadian court challenges program have a bias for feminists and homosexual cases? The answer is, and we've researched it very carefully, that members of the homosexual group Egale sit both on the board of directors and on the advisory board of the organization.