Thank you. My name is Elizabeth Atcheson.
I'd like to make three points about the broader context relevant to consideration of the court challenges program. It has been a modest but important and uniquely Canadian portage between some very challenging spaces for women and girls: public policy, the courts, and the private sector.
Primary responsibility for improving equality for women rests first with the Government of Canada, in the case of our international commitments, and with all governments, in the case of our constitutional standards. It is ironic that Canada's signing of the Beijing Declaration in 1995 marks the peak of public commitment to reducing women's inequality.
Whatever gender-management system we had has been dismantled by successive governments. As this committee has observed, newer processes such as gender-based analysis have been paid lip service over more than a decade.
Despite our capacity as a nation, Canada does not have a thorough and precise gender action plan with specific goals and demonstrable outcomes in such areas as women's economic security and prosperity or women's safety and health that takes into account our diverse situations. The argument that the state should not be funding challenges to its own decisions lacks legitimacy if the state chooses to ignore or avoid its commitments.
Second, the more scope the courts have to decide matters that touch on public policy for identifiable groups, the greater the access to courts should be for those groups. We spend considerable amounts of public resources on ensuring that people and organizations in Canada have access to various parts of the government, including parliamentarians.
Today is an example of that. All the things that work for other parts of the government do not work for courts. We cannot send an unstamped letter to the court. We cannot pick up a telephone and call a judge or come to a courtroom like a constituency office for a talk. We cannot utilize Service Canada. It takes specialized skills and dollars for disbursements. If we want people living in Canada to have confidence in matters that are important to them in their day-to-day lives, and to have confidence that those things will be considered in all venues, then they have to feel that they have access.
There is value in diverse public engagement in our fundamental institutions. This is just a quick quote from Louise Arbour in April of this year:
Central to the position of the Charter in Canadian federalism is the idea that...the greatest protection for individual rights...comes in large, pluralistic environments. Conversely, the greater danger comes from small, homogeneous communities who lack the imagination and the means to deal effectively with competing individual claims from within, specially the claims that question the apparent homogeneity.
Finally, questions about how to support access to justice for equality for women have to take into account available capacity from all sources. Women and girls face significant challenges in private sector fundraising that have no immediate or easy solution. We cannot easily substitute a private dollar for a public dollar.
Women are the backbone of volunteers in Canada, and all of our organizations run on significant volunteer commitment. That's not enough.
The pool for donations in Canada looks large: $9 billion 2004. The number of donors, however, is smaller than you might assume. Just over 20% of Canadians provide just over 80% of donations. Most revenues are concentrated among a comparatively small number of large entities. In 2003, 12% of organizations accounted for 89% of total revenues in the not-for-profit sector. That means the other 88%, which includes all of the organizations that work for women, live on 11%.
Foundations and corporations provide very limited funding to organizations or projects designed to advance or empower women. Best estimates are that only 5% to 10% of foundation and corporate donations in Canada--and it's the same in the U.S.--go directly to women and girls. Donations to universal programs do not necessarily benefit women and girls, and although there is limited research on this point, the research is very clear.
Canada's leadership in both the public and the private sectors is quick to cite human rights and our charter as national strengths and achievements, as distinctly Canadian characteristics. If they value them, they should support them in a manner consistent with the means available to them, just as we do.