My name is Chantal Tie. Thank you very much for inviting me here today. I am here as a representative of LEAF, the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund. We have historically been a significant beneficiary of the court challenges funds.
I sat for seven years on the national legal committee of LEAF, which determines the litigation, applies for funding, and determines the litigation strategy. I was then nominated by LEAF to run for the board of directors of the court challenges program. I took a leave from the national legal committee and served for seven years on the board of the court challenges program, four of those years as chairman of the board. I am the most recent past chair of the board of directors of the court challenges program, and I am now recently back on the national legal committee of LEAF.
I appeared before House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights about two weeks ago, following a presentation by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation on the court challenges program, and was astonished to hear that group say that eliminating the court challenges program was promoting equality because it levelled the playing field. I'd like to address my comments to that comment, which I must say astounded me.
It astounded me for a number of reasons. Primarily, in essence, it's equality with a vengeance, as the Supreme Court of Canada has said on occasion. It also presumes that treating everyone the same is what equality is all about. That is, quite frankly, an outdated notion, and one that was prevalent in the 1960s. It is a thinking that takes us back forty years, in complete ignorance of the developments in human rights and equality legislation in the past forty years. It is a vision of equality that says that when you treat everyone the same, that's all you need to do. Treating everyone the same is called “formal equality”. Unfortunately, everyone is not similarly situated. One must look at the impact of the decisions upon affected people.
That statement by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, which seemed to find favour with government representatives, left me with two possible conclusions. Either those members who supported that decision or that approach clearly have no understanding of what equality is and have no knowledge of development in equality jurisprudence and thinking in the last forty years, or they do understand the difference and have deliberately engaged in doublespeak to confuse the issues that are before us and, in effect, merely disagree with the vision.
What is the vision? The vision is not some invention of LEAF or the court challenges program, although we do admit that we may have contributed toward the building of that vision. It is the vision that the Supreme Court of Canada has said our charter, which is the law of this land, mandates. It is a substantive equality. If you apply that vision to the elimination of this program, it cannot be justified under any definition of equality.
What does this program do? I think Mr. Rollason's comments were very apt. He thought it was important to show you the face of someone who has benefited from the court challenges program. The court challenges program brings the faces and the voices of disenfranchised, marginalized, and discriminated-against people in this country before the court. Unfortunately, judges labour under the same handicap that parliamentarians may labour under as well, and that is that they do not have the lived experience of disadvantage that needs to come before the courts when the courts are adjudicating rights under the charter.
It is absolutely essential that those voices be heard, and the court challenges program provides extremely modest funding to groups who are identified as disadvantaged in our charter, so that their voices can be heard. Without their voices, we will have a thin and impoverished view of equality. Unfortunately, we may end up with a view of equality from back in the 1960s that says that treating everyone the same is equality.
It's also extremely important that the current structure, or a structure very similar to the current structure of the court challenges program, be maintained. That structure gives the disadvantaged groups themselves significant say in the priorities and the direction and allocation of funds, on a test-case basis, to litigation.
People who suffer disadvantage must play an important and active role in remedying that disadvantage. Eliminating funding to the program does none of those things. It silences voices; it makes our Supreme Court a bastion of the rich and the privileged, not a defender of the rights of the disadvantaged.
That's not what our charter says. Our charter says that we are to have those rights. If we have no access to the courts, we will not enjoy any of those rights.
Thank you.