Thank you.
I speak out of my experience as counsel for the Native Women's Association of Canada since the year 1991, and also as one of the founders of LEAF. But I will concentrate today on the litigation experience of the Native Women's Association that has been made possible by the court challenges program. I want to make two basic points.
My first point is that the court challenges program makes possible an orderly and law-abiding approach to social change. It gives access to the rule of law to people who do not have advantages and who do not have the means to access law through their own resources. It is thereby accomplishing something that supports the very infrastructure of our democracy.
The second point I wish to make is that the various activities of the court challenges program have actually served to complement rather than displace the legislative activity of the Canadian Parliament. I have a few examples for you.
It is not always the case that recipients of court challenges funding use that funding to attack federal legislation. Sometimes it has been the case, as Madame Tremblay has pointed out, that disadvantaged groups have used their court challenges funding to appear in court and defend legislation passed by Parliament that supports their human rights. That is the case with victims of violent crime, for example, who have appeared with court challenges funding to support the safeguards put into the Criminal Code for them.
Sometimes people use court challenges funding to explore new applications of legislation already on the books. The Native Women's Association received court challenges funding specifically to explore the defence of self-defence. This was in the context of an aboriginal woman who had been very poorly served by police services, to the point where she was taught by the state that the only thing she could do when attacked by a man almost twice her size was to respond in kind. She is using existing law and asking that it be interpreted so as to uphold her equality.
Litigation will also be only part of a policy development process. The Native Women's Association of Canada brought a case against the federal government complaining about the total absence of family property provisions with respect to Indian reserves. That situation had started in 1986 with a decision of the Supreme Court. It was not until the Native Women's Association, with court challenges funding, drew this matter to public attention by means of a lawsuit under section 15 that policy development began at all. Up until that time, government--all governments--had said, it is a terrible shame, but we don't know what to do about it. It was only when we took the government to court that they began to develop their policy.
The last point I wish to make is that in an environment like that inhabited by aboriginal women, we find that the women are subject, on a daily basis, to almost total influence and control by legislation of the federal government. The Indian Act is a totalizing control over the lives of the people who are subject to it. Without means like the court challenges program, women who are subject to the discrimination in the Indian Act have no defence against an influence on their lives that begins before they are born and lasts until after they die.
Thank you.