Stephen Harper rejects using the Court Challenges Program for his own partisan goals
The Court Challenges Program is history, and good riddance. It was a tool for the Liberal Party, a way of using government money to pay private individuals to pursue the Liberal Party agenda. But special congratulations have to go to Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party. They could easily have declared that they were going to "fix" the CCP, and then used it to fund Conservative-friendly court challenges.
The Court Challenges Program is down, but is it dead?
It died once before, just to be resurrected:
1993: Responding to widespread public concern about the Program's cancellation, Kim Campbell, then Minister of Justice, announced in August 1993, prior to the fall election, that the government would reinstate the Program if elected. The Liberal Party also promised in its election Red Book to reinstate the Program.
Wow, it must be nice to know that no matter which side won, your program was going to be funded.
The CCP is, of course, the taxpayer-funded program that was supposed to provide funds to those who felt their language or Charter rights were not being respected to pay for a court challenge.
Looks good on paper, but in practise, someone has to make a decision about whose complaints would be funded. Some people who felt they had a legitimate concern would not be funded.
One wonders if someone in the government had considered a Court Challenges Challenges Program to fund people who wanted to sue the Court Challenges Program for not funding their court challenges.
As far as I know, such a fund was never created, but in principle it highlights the fundamental problem with a public program that provides money to people to pursue private agendas. In the end, the money will go to those people whose agendas happen to promote the agenda of the government of the day:
Ottawa is spending millions to push gay rights and ''stringent'' feminist views of equality by funding legal cases, says a political scientist who has studied the court challenges program.
The money is supposed to go towards ''important court cases that advance language and equality rights guaranteed under Canada's Constitution.''
But Ian Brodie of the University of Western Ontario says the court challenges program has made up its mind which groups will get the cash.
''They're heavily funding the one side,'' he said Thursday. ''It happens to be the gay-rights side, the pro-pornography side, the feminist side and the abortion issue.''
Since 1999 the program has adopted a policy of absolute confidentiality, refusing to provide any information on the cases or groups it funds.
Brodie analysed the program prior to 1992 by obtaining records that were available under access to information laws. His study is being published in the June issue of the Canadian Journal of Political Science.
Interestingly, starting in 1992, the program arranged to have its work free from access to information requests, on the eve of the Liberal Party returning to power.
Actually this makes sense if the program stopped being about funding court challenges initiated by members of the public and instead became a slush fund for the Liberal Party to use to move money to those groups whose agendas promoted the Liberal-ization of Canada (and I mean "Liberal-ization" in the sense of making Canada a one-party state under the Liberal Party).
So special kudos to the Conservative Party and to Stephen Harper. They recognized that the CCP was not just a waste of money, or just poorly managed. They recognized that the CCP was not just something that could be fixed. They recognized that the CCP was inherently dangerous, that it could not be anything but a tool for a government to use to surreptitiously drive changes in the social landscape that align with a particular party's philosophy.
But reaching that understanding is not what earns the Conservative Party and to Stephen Harper much deserved praise. It is that they rejected the temptation to use that tool for themselves. They could have just as easily handed the CCP to the control of hand-picked bureaucrats who would have made sure that future funding went to groups looking for stronger property rights, for example, and any other Conservative-friendly issue you can imagine. But instead they recognized that the CCP is a corruptive influence. That whatever help the CCP could have provided in promoting conservatism was illusory, since it would have come at the cost of transparency and good governance. And ensuring transparency and good governance is far more important to protecting our Charter rights than anything the CCP could hope to accomplish.
For other posts on the demise of the CCP, check out these two lists of links: here and here.
If you want to register your approval of the cancellation of the CCP, or if you would like to see the CCP come back, get in touch with your MP.
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Comments
Unlike some of the other posts, this was well thought out. I think that they should have reformed the Court Challenges Program instead of scrapping it, but make it done solely through means testing, otherwise those with the least amount of money versus what political agenda they were pushing. This would ensure the poor don't have their rights trampled on, while at the same time taxpayers aren't forced to subsidize a one-sided agency.
However, I should note that on the property rights one, that is not in the Charter, so until it is added, that cannot be used. However freedom of religion or freedom of speech could be used by the CCP if expanded beyond equality and language rights.
Posted by: Miles Lunn at October 18, 2006 12:08 AM
I'm male: I have a VERY valid equality problem. I could NOT, I could not get access to the CCP. The reason is straight forward, my equality concern which is a fatality concern to me(1) would inconvenience some females if addressed.
THAT, that is the CCP as it was. The "equality" concerns of the CCP only had merit if they involved females or racial minorities.
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1: I went through a near fatal female offender sex assault back in 1981. There was also a fair bit of female offender damage due to the fight to get lone fathers basic human rights. Current law says that I, being male, have no right to protection from female police officers and prison guards. This means, given my extreme sensitivity to being controlled by females, that any female in Canada may murder me --legally-- by simply making a good enough false charge. The law was never meant to be used as a murder weapon, but that is THE LAW in Canada, for the few men in positions similar to my own.
Posted by: jw at October 18, 2006 04:34 AM
Miles - I don't know if your 'fix' would change anything. Instituting a means test might sound good, but any special interest group could easily find a defendent who looked poor.
I think the only way the program could have been improved is through absolute transparency. I think that if people knew the program was exclusively used to support feminists, etc., they would quickly see the dangers that the CPC evidently saw.
Now that it has been abolished, everyone is equal (isn't it odd how the only way to achieve actual equality is usually to remove the social engineering?). It doesn't mean that the feminists, etc., can't still challenge laws, but it does mean that they have to fundraise for themselves. If there really is as much support for radical feminism and the gay agenda out there as they would like us to believe, then they should have no trouble raising money - but if that were the case the CCP wouln't have been required in the first place, would it?
Posted by: Jeff at October 18, 2006 08:21 AM
What rubbish. Have you done any research at all on exactly who actually accessed the court challenges program? There are many, many examples of it not being used as a bastion for 'liberal' values ...take, as one instance, the veteran widows who used it to fight for their dead husband's pensions.
Bottom line for me is that money should not be an obstacle to standing up for your rights.
Posted by: mark at October 18, 2006 09:23 AM
One of the prouder CCP moments must have been the decision that gave murderers & rapists in Federal prisons the right to vote. As much as this must have gladdened the hearts of Liberal & NDP activists, I'm still pretty sure how I feel about paying the freight on that one.
Now, I've been thinking... there's any number of things I'd like to see challenged in the courts. Can I get funding for my ideas?
Idea #1 - Anyone who murders an individual with dependent children, in addition to jail, should be forced to provide child support for said children in the same way a divorced parent would be obligated. If the homicidal individual was previously set free by the National Parole Board, said fiduciary duty will also be imposed on any & all moonbats who released the stipulated thug.
If the miscreant in question can't come up with the cash, we confiscate all his possessions & put a lifetime "murderer lien" on anything he owns, or ever hopes to own, in this lifetime.
Posted by: neo at October 18, 2006 10:31 AM
Remember how the CCP leapt to the defence of Bruce and Donna Montague and millions of other Canadians to valiantly fight C-68?
Right alongside the Canadian Civil Liberties Union.
Yeah, right...
Good riddance.
Posted by: Mad Mike at October 18, 2006 10:40 AM
So the best argument mark can come up with is that the CCP once supported the "right-wing cause" of giving an old woman more money from the government? Not meaning to offend anyone on the pension issue, but if the most right-leaning case still involved people getting pension cash, then there was no right-leaning cases and Steve's characterization of the CCP is bang-on.
Posted by: Feynman and Coulter's Love Child at October 18, 2006 04:21 PM
mark: The pension case involved getting money FOR WOMEN. There are no cases and could be no cases in which the CCP was used to solve an equality case in which the primary issue is mistreatment of males because we are male.
THAT, that is my issue with the CCP.
Posted by: jw at October 19, 2006 04:16 AM
 
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