Good morning, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee.
Thank you for having invited me to talk to your committee about the Court Challenges Program, the CCP. The Fédération des associations de juristes d'expression française de Common Law inc. brings together seven associations of French-speaking legal scholars that collectively represent 1,200 jurists. The FAJEF works to promote and defend the language rights of francophone minorities in Canada's legal sector. The federation is also a member of the FCFA, the Fédération des communautés francophones et acadienne du Canada.
Our association would first like to point out that the CCP played a pivotal and significant role in fostering the development of francophone minorities, and full recognition and promotion of the use of French in Canadian society. In fact, legal bilingualism has made great strides because of court challenges that were supported through the CCP, such as in the Beaulac and Donnie Doucet cases.
By eliminating funding to the CCP, there is risk of stagnation, at best, or regression in language rights, at worse. This does not bode very well at all, in terms of compliance with Part VII of the Official Languages Act of Canada. as my colleague, Mr. Doucet, mentioned.
In our case, in particular, we are concerned with the entire issue of access to justice in French. The association is greatly concerned over the impact that funding elimination will have on francophone and Acadian communities' ability to defend their constitutional rights. We hear about francophone groups or individuals who do not have the resources to defend their language rights before the courts. Their situation is not complicated: no funding means no access, no defence of language rights, and to a great extent, no advancement of language rights.
In fact, the FAJEF has already fallen victim to this situation. At present, we are unable to intervene in cases to the extent that we were able to in past cases brought before the Supreme Court of Canada.
It should be mentioned that it is because of the CCP that francophone and Acadian communities now have services and institutions such as schools located in their communities. Eliminating the CCP is also detrimental to Canadian citizenship, and in particular for francophone minorities in Canada. Why? Because a francophone who chooses to live in a province where he will be in the minority may be forced to pay out of pocket to have his l constitutional language rights respected. As you are fully aware, this is a very expensive undertaking, one that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. If a minority francophone has language rights, but has no assurances that they will be respected, what does this mean?
By abolishing funding to the CCP, the message being sent to francophone minorities is the following: it's your language, it's your problem, protecting language rights of francophones is not an issue of public interest and does not deserve to be financially supported by the federal government. We believe this is very serious. If eliminating funding to the CCP is based on the argument that some groups or individuals do not receive funding, our federation does not see any problem in broadening the mandate of the CCP, with the caveat that the poor and linguistic minorities must not be excluded. In fact, we believe that debating ideas before the courts is healthy. It is not by eliminating access to justice for the less fortunate or for linguistic minorities that a debate of this nature will take place.
If eliminating funding for the CCP is based on the principle that the federal government should not help fund challenges launched against it, it follows that the tax system should be reformed. For example, a media outlet can currently claim business expenses to reduce taxes paid should it be involved in a constitutional challenge against the federal government over freedom of expression, section 2 of the Charter. Given the nature and evolution of law, the FAJEF firmly believes that a program similar to the Court Challenges Program, or at least one equivalent to it, must be an important component of our system.
That concludes my remarks. I'll be happy to answer your questions now.