Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak to this motion presented by the leader of the Liberal Party regarding the court challenges program. In the last part of his speech, he said that if the Liberals are elected, they would double the funding. I hope this does not mean that they will double their efforts to break the law governing minority rights.
The court challenges program served minorities across the country. Whether to tackle the problems facing official language minorities, that is, anglophones in Quebec or francophones in the rest of Canada, or problems facing gay and lesbian people, women's groups or aboriginal groups, everyone used the court challenges program to be able to fight in court and see justice served.
As our Bloc Québécois colleague just mentioned, the court challenges program was important for minorities that won cases they never could have won otherwise. As we have seen, it is not just large organizations with a lot of money that can fight in court and win. We saw the example of Ms. Lalonde, president of SOS Montfort, with all the work that was involved. She even told the Standing Committee on Official Languages that it was the $75,000 received from the court challenges program that in the end helped SOS Montfort win its case.
But the Conservatives suddenly cancelled the court challenges program. I thought that was despicable. Furthermore, they said they could not accept the fact that they were giving money to people who were fighting the government in court. The Minister of the Environment said so right here in the House of Commons. As my Bloc colleague was saying, that same minister was part of the government of Mike Harris, who wanted to close the Montfort Hospital. These are the same people. There is also the Minister of Finance, as I already mentioned in my speech concerning a report on court challenges by the Standing Committee on Official Languages.
It is even worse than that. We have seen what has happened in Fredericton, not so long ago. Mr. Doucet of l'Université de Moncton defended a case. The government not only went to court to prove that it had the right to cut the court challenges program, but it even said to the judge that if it won the case, it wanted the community to pay. The government wanted the people who took it to court to assume all the expenses. It was not enough to say that it would no longer support the organizations wanting to seek justice before the courts, it wanted to ask the judge to make them pay all the legal costs.
In court, it was interesting to hear the argument of the Conservative government. Its representatives told the judge that it was up to the government itself to decide how to spend its money for the minorities, not to the court. They added that if people were not happy, they should not vote for them. It was inconceivable. The Conservatives told the judge that, in Ottawa, they were the ones making the laws and that if they violated them, people only had to wait four years to kick them out and seek justice. They even said to the court that it should not exist in Canada. In my opinion, it was insulting for the Canadian justice system. It really was an insult to the court, in Fredericton.
We need only think of Ms. Paulin who was arrested by the RCMP in Fredericton. She fought her ticket, which was in English only, and argued that she was unable to obtain service in French in the only officially bilingual province in Canada. The RCMP is a federal police force though. When Ms. Paulin challenged the way she was treated by the RCMP, the federal government said it was a provincial not a federal matter. The case went to court once again. The federal government said that the RCMP was indeed involved, but that it was providing its services to the province of New Brunswick. The government could therefore violate New Brunswick law because the province was paying the RCMP.
The RCMP is the symbol of the federal government and of Canada. If it is paid by the province, it has the right to contravene the law and we do not get involved.
The case went to court once again and we waited for an answer. Finally an agreement was reached. The RCMP was to respect New Brunswick's law and provide services in both languages.
The court challenges program helped settle this case. Without it, Ms. Paulin of Tracadie-Sheila would never have been able to afford to go to court. These negotiations would never have taken place and the agreement with New Brunswick to respect both its official languages would not have come about.
We should take a look at the cases that have been won. There are those involving women, for example. Women went to court as a minority that did not obtain justice. They won their case. So did the First Nations. There was the case of the disabled who wanted to board a CN train that was not accessible. They too used this program. There are many such cases.
If we do not give our minorities the possibility to have the law enforced, if the government says that it will deprive us of the main tool that can help us get justice done, we are heading the wrong way. That important program got $5.6 million. It has been an important program for the minority groups in Canada, namely for PEI and Nova Scotia schools.
Earlier, I talked about the RCMP in New Brunswick. We could talk about a lot of things that happened in that province.
Consider for example the Ontario schools. When I went to Sudbury as part of a national tour on official languages, people said that it was thanks to the court challenge program that they got the right to study in their own language. I am thinking here about the Collège Boréal in Sudbury. It is through battles fought by the French languages organizations with the help of the court challenge program that they finally won their case and that they finally can get the services in their language. The same thing happened in Manitoba, B.C., Saskatchewan and Alberta, that is everywhere we went.
There is something regrettable in all of this. Earlier the Parliamentary Secretary for Official Languages was talking about the federal government's action plan, but he did not say that the government's action plan had expired on March 31. Today is April 1. The action plan is no longer in effect. It has expired. And yet, the government is giving no indication of what it is going to do about it.
The Conservative parliamentary secretary did not say that no money was allocated in the budget for the action plan. He said that money would come later, as though minorities were not important. The government's action plan and the money will come later. The government had to hire Bernard Lord, the former Premier of New Brunswick, to conduct a study behind closed doors when the parliamentary committee had already done all the work. The parliamentary committee had already travelled across Canada and reported to the House and the minister. The minister already knew everything Bernard Lord presented.
However, Bernard Lord did not say in his report that when he met with Canadians from across the country behind closed doors, that the communities told him that the court challenges program should be reinstated. He did not talk about that at all in his report. He was mum on the whole matter of the court challenges program.
However, when members of the Standing Committee on Official Languages toured the country, all the agencies told us that the top priority was the court challenges program, which provides the means to go to court and seek justice. The linguistic rights we have achieved in Canada were granted by the courts. It was not the government who granted those rights; it was not the Liberal government who granted them to us. The legislation was there, it was violated, and the judges provided us justice. For all those reasons, we are supporting this motion.
We hope the government will see reason one day and understand that it has taken away the ultimate tool from minorities. Whether we are talking about official languages, women's rights or aboriginal rights, every minority in Canada has been affected. This is a loss for Canada and the court challenges program should be reinstated.