Good morning. On behalf of the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund, LEAF, we would like to thank the standing committee for this opportunity to discuss the proposed renewal and modernization of the court challenges program. I'm the executive director of LEAF and with me is Dr. Elizabeth Shilton, who is a member of the LEAF board of directors, but also co-chairs LEAF's law program committee.
LEAF is a national non-profit organization founded in April of 1985 to promote women's equality through test case litigation, law reform, and public education. Over the past thee decades LEAF has intervened in over 50 equality rights cases before the Supreme Court of Canada.
Our litigation work has been recognized internationally, and scholars have credited LEAF's work at the Supreme Court level with an important role in establishing a constitutional and legal basis for a comprehensive theory of substantive equality in Canadian law. From 1985 to 2006 the court challenges program made a very significant contribution to that work. LEAF was one of the most frequent recipients of court challenges funding. Louise Arbour, a former Supreme Court justice, has argued that both LEAF and the court challenges program have led the way for the evolution of the charter as a solid instrument of social progress in Canada.
Without the assistance of the funding from the program, it is fair to say that LEAF, among groups, would have been significantly less active in the courts to the detriment of the equality rights of women and girls across Canada.
Let me summarize LEAF's position on two key issues that this committee should consider addressing while looking at the renewal and updating of the court challenges program. Consistent with our mandate, LEAF's focus would be on equality rights.
First, the equality rights program of the court challenges program must be fully reinstated to facilitate compliance with Canada's Constitution and international obligations.
Second, the equality rights program must be properly resourced. The charter guarantees equality rights, and those rights cannot be realized for those disadvantaged groups intended to be the beneficiaries of that guarantee unless they have access to the resources necessary to enforce and protect them.
We also support expanding the criteria to include cases in provincial and territorial jurisdictions, which we address in our written brief.
I will now ask Dr. Shilton to briefly flesh out LEAF's position on these key points.