Thank you, Madam Chair.
First, I want to say thank you for coming today.
The words “radical feminist” have been thrown around this morning. I have to say that I never thought of myself as radical, but certainly I've always thought of myself as a feminist. I suppose at times in this room I'm a radical, as well.
But you know what? Without us or without the famous five, who were very radical compared to me, we wouldn't even have the right to vote today, probably, and we wouldn't even be persons, and who knows what else we wouldn't have.
Actually, after listening to some presentations on the tax structure in the last couple of days while looking at gender budgeting, we also found that the whole basis of the tax structure is quite systemically racist and discriminatory against women. Maybe we should do a charter challenge on that as a whole. I think that would be a fun one to do, quite frankly.
Having said all that, I guess what I'm saying, really, is that we know that the problems are there. We know that the systemic problem of discrimination against women in this country is alive and well and exists. We know that government policies--federal, provincial, municipal, and what have you--can miss the mark and create disadvantages, unintended or otherwise. And there are still nuggets there from previous legislation that need to be addressed.
We know that “no means no” would never have happened, and I think that's something we would never want to go back on.
For me, obviously, the court challenges program is of fundamental importance in continuing to give women and all minorities in this country an ability to defend themselves.
I guess I have more of a comment than I have questions, partly because I think, to some degree, a lot of the things we've discussed here this morning..... I have here a whole list of cases that affected only women, because I went on the website of the charter challenge program itself. I didn't even get cases that affect the other minorities overall, just women. There is a whole slew here, which I'm not going to try to put in the record.
I guess my only question to all of you would simply be this: Looking forward rather than backward, what would you do? Let's reinstate the program, yes. But what else would you do with it? Actually, that's even more important to me at this point.