Good morning.
Since 2009, after the abolition of the court challenges program and the creation of the language rights support program in 2009, we have had 125 requests for litigation support, and 85 of them were accepted. That speaks to the continued need, on the side of language rights anyway, for such a program. We had an evaluation of the language rights support program in 2014 that basically confirmed that need.
The challenges for complainants are high. The cost of litigation has exploded. The type of support these kinds of programs can provide is more than symbolic. It gets you past a certain threshold to have a good case and present it to the courts. We continue to think that there is a need for such a program.
By and large, over the last 30 years we've had one big decision by the Supreme Court a year, 30 decisions, on language rights issues. If we look at the cases that are in front of the courts today, we still have important parts of section 23 on education, for example, that need to be clarified.
I don't know what the trends were on the equality cases after the abolition of the court challenges program, but maybe Justice could speak to that.