Well, the impact of the cuts to the program on racialized women can be described from the test case on the Chinese head tax and the Chinese Exclusion Act. The case was funded by the program, but it was dismissed on the preliminary motion. However, it opened up some doors to negotiations, as the Chinese Canadian National Council received negotiation funding from the court challenges program. The negotiation strategy helped the impacted community focus on a position that enabled it to present the injustice of the Chinese head tax to the Chrétien, Martin, and Harper governments, resulting in the 2006 parliamentary apology and redress announcement by the current government.
The program also funded case development applications for racialized women wishing to develop a case about visible minority hiring and promotion in the civil service or senior management positions; and funded racialized women wishing to develop case challenges on issues concerning employment insurance eligibility and their failure to access available benefits due to the confluence of poverty and race. Unfortunately, those two kinds of cases can no longer be funded because the program has been cut.
Research was also funded on the intersection of race and other enumerated grounds. For instance, research on race and disability provided an insight into the issues that various racialized group members with disabilities face.
Research and consultation on racial profiling paved the way for discussion of the relevance and the need for race-based data collection. These activities helped highlight the prevalence of racial profiling by law enforcement agencies and border crossing officials. You can see this in the cases of Richards and Decovan Brown.
The consultation that reflected the two parts of the court challenges program, language rights and equality rights, addressed the barriers faced by the racialized immigrant women who speak French—a minority within the racialized group. The women wished to gather to speak about and identify issues related to the multiple layers of prejudice and barriers they face in trying to access services. They also wished to learn about the charter's equality rights, as they were related to their struggles for housing and employment.
The program, therefore, is seen as one of the mediums by which government can ensure checks and balances in the Canadian justice process. For racialized group members, in particular women who come from repressive countries, the transparency, accountability and access to change-of-government laws, policies, and practices through the application of the court challenges program was a welcome relief. It proved that Canada was committed to a democratic system and to adhering to equality rights enshrined in its constitution. To racialized women, cutting funding appears to be a regressive move by government in relation to the advancement of equality and language rights.
Contrary to the argument that funding the court challenges program is about government wasting money in challenging itself, such funding reflects a process that allows the marginalized to highlight laws and practices that are discriminatory, and to do so in a manner that respects their rights. It's about a country that is willing to be a world leader in its commitment to human rights and equality rights by using a process that suggests that government is accountable and transparent in how it makes justice for all.