Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Firstly, I would like to welcome you to the committee.
First, the Court Challenges Program was abolished; now there is talk of reinstating a watered-down version. Official languages cases would be allowed, while others would be sent elsewhere. I was not here when our last witness, Ms. Kheiriddin, who is a law professor at McGill University, appeared before the committee. According to today's Le Droit, however, she argued the following when she appeared before the committee, and I quote:
If you want to convince the government to protect linguistic minorities, you need simply tell it that it has to be the law.
We have to hope, therefore, that the government acts in good faith. However, the problem is that the government simply does not obey the law. We have a great act and a great Constitution, yet infringement occurs on a daily basis. And it is simply tough luck for those who cannot afford to go to court over these failures to uphold the law. What the government is saying is that it will carry on as usual, but it will no longer fund court challenges, because it is going to comply with Canada's laws. I would submit to you that if the law had always been respected, we would never have had to go to court and we would never have needed the Supreme Court either.
Allow me to continue reading the comments that were quoted in the Le Droit newspaper:
If (subsection) 41(2) of the Official Languages Act requires, as a positive measure, the government to establish a program like the Court Challenges Program in Canada, there's your answer. ...That is not to say that the program as a whole has to be restored.
It was almost as if a messiah had come from Montreal to deliver a message to us! Things are starting to look up for the government. Somebody has found a solution to our problems. Let's divide people into groups. For example, members of the Standing Committee on Official Languages should only ever talk about official languages.
What did those who oppose the Court Challenges Program tell us? They told us that the program wasn't fair because it did not provide funding to all groups. Let us get the facts straight. Some groups, for instance, wanted to challenge the same-sex marriage legislation. Indeed, that was perhaps Mr. Harper's main problem. Some witnesses told us that certain minority groups did go to court, but did not receive any funding to support their case. That was the argument that was used.
To my mind, they did get funding insofar as the government used taxpayers' money to defend its case against these groups. Whenever a minority group feels that its rights are not being respected, the government uses taxpayers' money to defend its case. It is not a question of tax cuts, this is how taxpayers' money is really being used.