You're promoting me to general when I'm a lieutenant, a baby professor.
I want to keep it simple. My view is that it would be a mistake to entrench the Court Challenges Program, the CCP, into statutory law, even through a private member's bill like Bill C-316, because it's not appropriate for public money to support the program.
I have three basic reasons for this.
First, the way the CCP has been designed and implemented has ensured that it is subject to partisan contestation. The preamble of Bill C-316 partially acknowledges this by indicating the history of how the program was abolished and then reinstated, but what it leaves out is that it was abolished by Conservatives and reinstated by Liberals. In my view, this partisan contestation undermines the preamble's own stated aim that the program should be independently administered in a way that holds the government to account.
It's very difficult for a program that is understood, at least by one major political party, to be advancing the partisan agenda of another set of political actors to effectively hold the government to account over successive governments. In truth, overall, this threatens to mire Canadian courts in partisan contestation, which is something we want to avoid. We want to avoid politicizing our courts further.
Second, the Court Challenges Program was created to challenge provincial legislation, and [Technical difficulty—Editor] actually the courts whose judges are appointed by the federal government to strike down provincial laws. The risk it creates is that Canadian federalism will be eroded, and it is a particular threat for the Government of Quebec.
It should be noted that the program funded at least one of the applicants who is challenging Quebec's Bill 21 in the Hak case against the Attorney General of Quebec, and probably others.
Third, the very idea of the CCP is in tension with the charter statements program and the idea that the federal government and Parliament are themselves responsible and accountable for protecting the rights entrenched in the charter. The CCP partly outsources to unelected special interest groups the responsibility for ensuring that legislation complies with rights. If there is a human rights or language rights issue with Parliament's bills, then it is Parliament's responsibility to fix these issues before they become law. Indeed, in my view, that's what the charter statements program stands for: declarations about the consistency of bills that should be debated and taken responsibility for in Parliament.
All of these three reasons for objecting to the CCP and Bill C-316 are compounded by what both speakers before me have mentioned already: the lack of transparency surrounding the CCP.
The CCP claims solicitor-client privilege and does not reveal the names of intervenors and litigants that it supports. This lack of transparency is a big problem for those who want to defend the program and would like to see it entrenched in statutory law. If the supporters of the CCP wish to argue that Bill C-316 should enjoy partisan support from across different parties, then the first thing they should do is waive solicitor-client privilege and publish a comprehensive list of the interventions they find.
Since 2000, they have advertised only a select set of interventions and have not identified the intervenors in their annual reports, although you can figure out some of the intervenors by looking at the case and at who is an intervenor in them. The list that they actually publish is very select. First of all, this whole conception of solicitor-client privilege as an approach to transparency is contestable. Second, it's all waivable. The CCP can waive this privilege, and indeed there seem to be good reasons for doing so.
In truth, the 2016 report issued by the 2016 Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights on access to justice recommended that the CCP waive this privilege and publish in annual reports all cases that received support from the program. That's recommendation 7 from that report. I'll note that this committee report is, in the words of the sponsor of this bill, one of the sets of recommendations that motivated the introduction of this bill. If we're going to take this bill seriously and the reasons for it seriously, you might want to take the other recommendations in that report seriously as well.
In my view, whatever we make of the political future of the CCP or the future of this bill, informed debate about its merits cannot really take place without transparency about the kinds of cases it funds.
With that, I'll conclude my remarks and wait for the questions. Thank you very much.