Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
To begin with, Mr. Chairman, I do not have any problem with the motion by my colleague, Richard Nadeau. However, I am not quite clear on why there are concerns about this issue. I'm not talking about the motion, but rather the discussion. Why is there concern over the committee's future business? We already agreed, and more than agreed—the witnesses were here on May 15—that we were going to discuss and study the cancellation of the Court Challenges Program.
The committee cancelled the meeting two minutes before it was to start, but the witnesses were here. If they were here, it was because the issue was on the agenda. On that point certainly, I think we should stop basically wasting our time and agree that it was on the agenda. There is no difficulty in proving it. The people were there and they were waiting to be able to speak to the committee members.
I too think that young people, schools and all that are important, but they are important if we can give people tools to be able to speak, write and hear French. If the Court Challenges Program no longer exists, that will cause a serious problem. It is all very well to talk about young people. As I have already said in other discussions, it is fine to talk about young people, but if we do not give them the tools they need starting from birth and going on from there, it becomes difficult to really help these people when they are adults. So let us start when they are young and in school.
We know that some communities across the country have been faced with problems and have had to go to court to defend themselves. That has happened in Manitoba, Prince Edward Island, the Northwest Territories and various other regions. In fact, you could name any province or territory. If these problems had not occurred, we might be able to say today that the Court Challenges Program was not necessary. But that is not the reality.
The reality is that there have been cutbacks everywhere, and the communities have had to defend themselves. They are not rich. They have had to defend themselves and in order to do that, they needed resources. In order to get those resources, they have practically had to get down on their knees and beg the federal government to help them through the Court Challenges Program. Thus, they were able to defend their rights in court.
The informal meeting by the members of the Advisory Committee on Official Languages with people indicated to us that the language aspect involved approximately a half million dollars. That is peanuts in the context of the federal budget. It is very unfair that there are people who thought that these communities were receiving huge amounts in order to defend themselves against governments. In reality, they were getting peanuts to help them defend their rights.
We will be voting on Mr. Nadeau's motion, but I hope that people have said what they had to say and we will do what we were supposed to do back on May 15 by moving ahead with our study of the Court Challenges Program.