I tried to set out in my written submission to the committee a week ago that the Court Challenges Program has been on this kind of roller coaster existence of being created and being abolished. The Harper government announced it would abolish it, but never did, and the Court Challenges Program has continued on since 1994 in various forms.
Part of the challenge the Court Challenges Program has as an organization, and part of the challenge that the groups who get subsidies from the Court Challenges Program have, is that it has such a narrow political and, over time, partisan base. In the written submission, I tried to make the argument that the program can be stabilized by bringing the parties of the House of Commons into the governance structure—not by having it answer to Parliament, but by having each of the parties nominate people for appointment to the Court Challenges Program board of directors in an effort to broaden out the scope of the organization and therefore really broaden out the funding of the Court Challenges Program.
I would just note that over the course of the past three years, we went through a period of extraordinary repression of basic civil liberties and provisions of the Charter of Rights under the rubric of a pandemic response. I'm not going to get into whether that is a legitimate use of government power or not. All I'm suggesting is that a variety of groups and individuals challenged a number of the COVID-era rulings by both the provincial government and the federal government, all of which were privately financed, as far as I can tell. Certainly the Court Challenges Program has not released any details of funding they gave to any of those challenges. None of the groups represented here or before your committee in these hearings was involved in any of those challenges. Those were issues that were legitimately brought before the courts and were entirely financed by private fundraising efforts.
If we're going to stabilize the Court Challenges Program into the future, I think the Court Challenges Program has to broaden itself out into financing some of these types of challenges as well.