Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Good morning everyone.
As Ms. Folco just said, there is a report that was adopted, and then printed, on our visit to French- and English-minority communities last fall. The report is entitled, "Communities speak out: Hear our voice. The Vitality of Official Language Minority Communities". This document exists. If you would like a copy, let me know after the meeting. The committee could send you one.
On page 131 of this report, it states:
All the organizations we met were unanimously and profoundly opposed to the Government of Canada's plan to cancel the Court Challenges Program.
A little bit later, the committee adopted Recommendation 26, which reads as follows:
That the Government of Canada reinstate the Court Challenges Program or create another program in order to meet objectives in the same way.
It's not as if we were starting from scratch. Things have been said and done. I want you to know that.
I would also like people to remember another very important thing. The program was reviewed in 1997 and in 2003. Someone mentioned this earlier and I will repeat it. Both reviews determined that it was an effective and accountable program. Furthermore, it provides taxpayers with value for their money. During the 1997 review, it was also mentioned that, since its creation, the program has enabled the facilitation of numerous disputes which have greatly helped to clarify constitutional law. For example, nearly all the disputes that, within Canada, concerned the rights of official language minorities to education in their own language were funded by this program. Furthermore, many of the applicants for funding would not have been able to defend their case or further proceed without the program's support. For many of them, the program was the only possible source of funding.
I want everyone here today to know this. In the 2003 review—and I will be very brief—it states that the review's findings also show that many other aspects of constitutional provisions targeted by the program have yet to be clarified. Data show that this clarification is an ongoing process and, apparently, this will always be the case.
I would add that, because society is evolving, we need to ensure that if the state is at fault and parents, volunteers or organizations want to prove this, they need to be able to represent themselves, on an equal footing, before the courts.
Unlike what Mr. Benson and Ms. Kheiriddin are saying, it's not about providing ideological assistance for one group or another. It's that the state arrives with its army of lawyers, and parents and volunteers, in order to save their hospital or to have a school consistent with a recognized constitutional right for which they've been fighting for 60 years, need to have the tools to take action. I would even go so far as to say that, following the adoption of Regulation 17 by Ontario in 1912, if Franco-Ontarians had had the opportunity at that time to avail themselves of the Court Challenges Program, we probably wouldn't have had to wait until 1990 for the right to manage francophone schools in Ontario. Just imagine: from 1912 to 1990, that's a very long period during which all those battles had to be fought.
Mr. Gauthier, you took part in a fight to ensure that Franco-Saskatchewanians, children and parents who wanted French to be the language of instruction at school could have their schools. In the time I have left, could you tell us about the steps that parents had to go through in order to demonstrate that their social fabric is directly affected when constitutional rights are not respected and a government, be it federal or provincial, does not do its job, forcing you to go to the courts to ensure respect for the Constitution?
