Justice committee  That's a very good question and another important area to explore as we do our option development and policy development. I do think it's the rationale behind the activity stream that was around promotion and awareness. There was dedicated funding to promoting the program itself.

Justice committee  No. I don't think that would meet the eligibility criteria.

Justice committee  I'll answer the question indirectly by giving you the data that I have. We have it grouped by issue and then the number of cases. The highest number of cases was under colour, race, ethnicity, and nationality at 71, and then it was sex and gender equality at 60, sexual orientation at 40, linguistic at 39—the first linguistic says “various” and the second one is linguistic education—aboriginal at 27, poverty at 27, and then disability at 20.

Justice committee  The termination was part of the expenditure review process. With all expenditure review processes there are trade-offs and decisions made about where cuts will be made.

Justice committee  The biggest impact, obviously, was that FCFA pursued the government on the grounds that the cancellation of the program was not respecting official language rights. There was an out-of-court settlement, and the PADL was created and continues. That's the most immediate impact. We can't measure what cases didn't come forward because the program wasn't there, but fundamentally test cases weren't being funded anymore.

Justice committee  There was a variety of rights-based organizations. There were 290 groups that received funding. We tried to look at the top groups. The highest number of cases, representing about 20% of the total caseload, was for the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund, Egale Canada, the African Canadian Legal Clinic, the Center for Research-Action on Race Relations, and the Council of Canadians with Disabilities, but it spanned a lot of groups.

Justice committee  I guess there's one way I could answer that. I recently went to Geneva to appear before the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. That's an example of one the international treaties that Canada has signed on to and where in the past they have commended Canada for the CCP.

Justice committee  Obviously, the program was designed to have third party delivery, third party board and membership, and then on top of that an independent expert panel to review the application. Everything was put in place to provide that distance and impartiality. In modernizing the program we'll look at all aspects and whether that could be in force but there was no indication in the evaluations that there was a problem in impartiality.

Justice committee  We're always trying to do as well as we can.

Justice committee  I don't think we decide that in the sense that it's a responsive program, and so it was responding to what applications came forward. But I'll let Erin speak to that.

Justice committee  I think it's fair to say that the caps helped the program maximize the budget; you make sure you're saving some money for as many cases as possible. For case development, the cap was $15,000; for case funding for litigation, the trial level was capped at $60,000 and the appeal level at $35,000, so you can see that there were caps put in place.

Justice committee  Yvan, perhaps you could repeat your answer on that.

Justice committee  If I understand the question correctly, it's a similar question to how many cases were brought forward while it was existing.

Justice committee  On slide 6 we referred to the backward-looking statistics in terms of cases that were funded. It was 112.

Justice committee  Between 1994 and 2006?