I should say, Mr. Chair, that when I travel internationally, I'm often asked about this because of my academic work on the Court Challenges Program. I have difficulty explaining, either to legal activists or to government officials in other countries, how it came to be that the federal government pays organizations or individuals to sue in court for these kinds of rights issues.
There's a long tradition of public interest litigation challenging legislation and government action in the United States and in other countries. This goes back—we're in 2024—at least 100 years. I'll note that the great advances made on behalf of the black civil rights movement in the United States in court were entirely privately financed by donors and by charitable trust funds established by wealthy donors in the United States. In the signature cases that advanced desegregation of the U.S. universities and the U.S. public school systems, there was no similar Court Challenges Program and there was no similar federal funding of any of those cases.
It is certainly possible, and there are lots of examples around the world. In most of the examples of public interest litigation against government legislation or government policy in the world with functioning constitutions, it's relatively recently and only in Canada that the litigation was financed with the support of government subsidies like this.