Mr. Speaker, I know the member has a lot of experience in the area of the charter challenge. When I was involved in community work in the city of Toronto around 1986, the policy of the Government of Canada was not to provide subsidized language training, English or French as a second language, to immigrant women. The assumption was that immigrant women would not work when they arrived here or, if they did, they would do demeaning work so English did not matter. They were left behind and only the head of the household, supposedly the male, would get language training as an integration process. That was clearly discriminatory.
Myself and the organization I worked with, along with immigrant service agencies in the city of Toronto, consisting of women of immigrant and visible minority backgrounds, and LEAF, the women's legal education fund, launched a charter challenge to the Supreme Court of Canada on the basis of discrimination against immigrant women. At the time, it was a Conservative government under Brian Mulroney. We had to go that far in order to get rights for immigrant women. We succeeded, and did not have to go all the way.
Could the hon. member tell us why this is critically important to women in Canada?