Mr. Speaker, I think we have to put this all into perspective. Our party, our government, has been a proud supporter of rights through the decades, both federally and provincially.
It was a provincial Conservative government in Ontario that established the paid legal aid program in Ontario; one of the first in Canada. It was a federal Conservative government that first established the Bill of Rights. So, we have had a proud history in this area. While we have eliminated the court challenges program, I think it has to be put into perspective.
The biggest threat to legal rights in the last 15 or so years in this country were the drastic cuts the previous Liberal government made to provincial transfers. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Canadian citizens living in provinces like Ontario were denied access to justice. The Ontario legal aid plan, in the early 1990s, provided about 225,000 certificates a year. By the mid-1990s, that had been chopped to 75,000 a year. That is a reduction of two-thirds. For each certificate that was chopped, that was a Canadian citizen living in Ontario who was denied access to justice because of the denial of legal aid.
So, I think we have to put this all in perspective. What we have done here is eliminate a program and have used the resources for better means. We have to put this in a bigger perspective of what happened in previous years and other governments. As I said before, our party have a long and very proud tradition, both nationally and in the province of Ontario, defending legal rights.