I'll try. It's only something I've just started thinking about.
Let me say, first of all, we can and do raise money for the work that we do. However, it is extremely difficult to raise money for litigation. I've been doing it for 30 years. It takes people who are highly, highly committed, and there's a very small pool of people in that category.
Let me go to the issue of principles from design. You have to look really hard in the blue book, in the main estimates, to find a program at $3 million. This is a very small program in federal terms. In fact, we've probably spent more money on the committees looking at it than it would have cost to run it for this year, which is kind of shocking.
If in fact there's value in the effort—and that is certainly our argument and the argument of many people who aren't perhaps as close to it as we are but who look at the law or who look at these processes—then there's lots of room to expand it.
I disagree that it's not accountable. I think it has been very accountable for the money and I think that's entirely provable, but if there are accountability mechanisms, we have that expertise to get the right accountability mechanisms. We have expertise about appointments, to get the right appointments. We can do all these things if in fact we think there's a value in making sure that people who would otherwise not be able to can argue things that are of significance to the country.
I'd like to go back to a question. Our cases come up through the court system. They're funded in whatever way they are by parties. A lot of the work that we've done has been done by interventions, and that is because parties don't have a legal obligation or a professional obligation to speak to all of the issues that are raised in a case. For instance, in these criminal law cases, the parties—the crown and the accused—have no legal or professional obligation to think about how this affects the situation in which thousands and thousands of women find themselves.
What we need to do is think, does the court effort have value? Is it of value to be able to go to court, to be able to identify things that the court needs to know that are within its ambit, in a fair process and a process where the court has to hear from all parties equitably? If there's value in that, then let's take our public administration expertise and our public policy expertise and find a better way to do it.
I think inevitably that means expanding it. I don't happen to think that's a bad idea. I think $3 million in the federal system is a grain of sand.