Yes, it's very difficult for a number of reasons.
First of all, for those of us who are observers—and I've been an observer going back almost 30 years now—when the program cut off information to the public about who it funded and who it didn't in real time, it became impossible to do a proper analysis of what the impact of the Court Challenges Program was. Was it meeting the objectives set out by the funding document? Was it serving the public interest in a broader sense?
I would say that this is particularly difficult in cases involving one section of the Charter of Rights coming into conflict with another section of the Charter of Rights. The government has, if I understand correctly, legislation pending before Parliament on online harms. That legislation—I don't want to get into the details, since it's still being debated—will inevitably end up in court, with both freedom of expression claims and equality rights claims. It's very difficult for the groups that are on the freedom of expression side to argue the case if they think in the back of their heads that there's a possibility that the equality rights arguments being advanced in those cases are being funded by the federal government when their arguments are not.
To those of us who are observers, that's the kind of transparency issue that I think goes beyond, and goes to the actual implementation of the Charter of Rights and the guarantee of constitutionally protected rights and freedoms in the country.