Thank you very much. I'm very pleased to be here today.
I want to start by saying that the court challenges program is one of Canada's most important access-to-justice programs. The equality rights side of the program was added in 1985 when section 15 came into force and John Crosbie was the Minister of Justice.
It's essential to the rule of law in Canada that the law be accessible to everyone. The rule of law means a number of things. It means that the law should apply and be accessible to rich and poor people alike. I think our Constitution says that our country is founded on that principle, and that's a very basic principle of equality. It cannot be given reality in circumstances in which people who do not have means do not have rights.
By de-funding the court challenges program, we have essentially made equality rights in Canada exist only for the rich. People who are disdvantaged in this country, women among them, now do not have access to the constitutional rights we fought so hard to get in 1982 and were so proud of when they were put into the Constitution.
I remember that time well. After the struggles of women to be involved in getting new language into the Constitution, we then went forward to John Crosbie and said that now we that have the language, we have to have access to the use of it. That was the moment at which an existing program turned into the court challenges program, with equality rights funding as well as funding for challenges from linguistic minorities.
Canada says, when it goes to the United Nations to talk to the United Nations about its compliance with international human rights treaties, that the court challenges program is part of the machinery through which Canada fulfills its commitments internationally.
The court challenges program has been recognized repeatedly by international treaty bodies as a mainstay, a central component of Canada's human rights machinery, and a way in which we comply with those international human rights commitments.
It's been recognized by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in 1998 and 2006, by the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women in 2003, and by the Human Rights Committee in 2005. In all those circumstances, what the committees were saying to Canada about the court challenges program was that this was a wonderful program that should have been extended to apply to not only federal laws and policies but also to provincial laws and policies, so that people anywhere in the country dealing with any law or policy at any level should be able to access their rights.
I point out to you that in 2007 the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination reviewed Canada after the court challenges program had been de-funded. That committee said to Canada, “The Committee recommends that the State party”--that's Canada--“take the necessary measures to ensure access to justice for all persons within its jurisdiction without discrimination. In this connection, the Committee urges the State party to reinstate the Court Challenges Program...as a matter of priority.” In other words, in the latest review by United Nations treaty bodies, Canada has been found wanting for having de-funded the court challenges program.
The court challenges program has funded extraordinarily important cases and interventions for women over the last two decades. I will just mention these and hope we will be able to go into them in more detail. Among these are Canadian Newspapers; the Butler case, which had to do with obscenity laws; Mills, which had to do with rape shield laws and whether the accused in rape cases could get access to women's counselling records; O'Connor, which was the case against Bishop O'Connor, which did the same thing; Gosselin, which had to do with welfare law in Quebec; Lesiuk, which had to do with employment insurance law; and now the most important one, McIvor v. Canada.
We're very fortunate today to have Sharon McIvor with us to actually make comments and explain that case to us. A lot of people think the McIvor case is one of the most important sex equality cases of the last two decades. It has been funded by the court challenges program up until now; now there is no more funding for it to continue.