Yes, on September 25, 2006, when the government announced its budget cuts, we received a total of 118 complaints. The bulk of those complaints related to the abolition of the court challenges program--or, I should say, the suspension of the funding for the court challenges program. But a number of them, some 49 of the complaints, were related to reductions in programs dealing with the status of women, that is, the cuts in funding to Status of Women Canada and to some other programs that had been directed to funding women's groups in minority language communities.
What we did is deal with them all together. What the amendment to the act means is that the government is now legally obliged to take positive measures for the growth and development of minority communities. So with that lens, we looked at the decision-making process to see if that obligation had been taken into account. We did a very detailed inquiry and report, and we concluded that as far as we were able to discover, there was no evidence that the government had taken this obligation into account when it made these decisions, and we said so in our preliminary report in the spring of 2007.
The government's preliminary response was to the effect that it was not their interpretation of their obligation. In my recommendation, I made clear that I felt that the government has the right to govern, but it is obliged to take account of its obligations under the law when it does so. So my recommendation was that the government should review the decision-making process that had led up to those decisions, taking into account its obligations under part VII of the act. The government has not accepted either my interpretation or my recommendation, and so after our final report came out, we decided to intervene in the case that was taken before the Federal Court by the Fédération des communautés francophones et acadienne. That hearing took place in February in Fredericton, and we're waiting for the judge's decision.
That solely deals with the court challenges program. On the other aspects, we're in the process of considering how to proceed further.