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The
howlers are out before Halloween this year. The abusive
use of tax dollars by the thieves of the Court Challenge
Program do not want to work for a living like other
Canadians. They expect that their groups and the lawyers
they employ should be paid by YOU, the taxpayer.
If
one studies the cases that YOU have funded we would
see that most cases were NOT human rights based cases
at all. They were political activist and leftist ideological
cases that YOU paid for. This MUST be stopped. And it
must not be reinstated.
Case
after case in the last 4 years was a case against human
rights. Is a case about somebody's sexual habits a human
rights case? Really - now get real- making sodomy a
human right is absurd and dangerous. The crying and
whining will go on but let the facts instead of idiot
ideology govern this nation.
The
secrecy of who gets the tax money via this scheme, the
biased and bordering on hateful arguments taken before
a court, the inequality in access to the courts created
by this tax funded scheme and the conflict of government
paying lawyers to argue against the government are ALL
reasons this foolish concept must be buried forever.
Liberals like to sell memberships to the dead - they
will likely want to raise this from the dead to. It
stunk before it was buried, it smells even worse now
so leave it buried.
We,
the taxpayers cannot allow this scheme to ever happen
again.
--
Canada Family Action Coalition
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Monday,
the Conservative government announced it was cancelling
the Court Challenges Program (CCP). Expect it to die
loudly, if it dies at all. The Mulroney government cancelled
it once before, in 1992. The hue and cry then was so
deafening that no matter who had won the 1993 general
election - Liberal, Conservative or NDP - the program
would have been reinstated. All three parties had promised
to resurrect it.
The
CCP is the darling of powerful liberal-left special
interest groups who are used to getting their way if
they make enough noise - notably feminists, gay-rights
activists and aboriginals. The CCP may be funded by
Canadian taxpayers, but it has been taken over by the
very special interest groups that are its major beneficiaries.
Aided by their ideological supporters in the academic
and legal communities, these "rights-seeking"
advocacy organizations use the program to fund court
cases whose goal is a radical interpretation of the
Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Most
of the time, when such cases get to court, these left-leaning
government-funded organizations are opposed by traditionalist
or right-of-centre groups who receive no tax dollars
to cover their legal expenses. According to one source
close to the CCP, in a recent court challenge on same-sex
marriage, the program funded two lawyers who intervened
in favour of same-sex nuptials, one to the tune of $645,000
and the other for $409,000. Yet despite the fact that
the program is funded by taxpayers, it paid none of
the fees of the lawyers representing citizens' groups
opposed to changing the traditional definition of marriage.
Indeed, the CCP has never funded any cases other than
those brought by leftist special interests in its 21
years of underwriting challenges to the Charter's equality
provisions.
Admittedly,
it's not entirely easy to tell who the CCP funds or
how much it gives them because after the Liberals restored
the program more than a decade ago, they turned it into
an arms-length corporation. In a letter responding to
a column I'd written three weeks ago urging the government
to kill the Court Challenges Program, CCP chairman Guy
Matte wrote: "The program is completely accountable
to the Canadian people and to government." Not
quite. When the Liberals remade it, they also put it
beyond the reach of Access to Information legislation.
Now all the CCP's annual reports are required to show
are which cases the program has helped pay for - not
which organizations' lawyers received money, nor what
amounts. The program hides behind claims of solicitor-client
privilege to keep from having to tell Canadians those
details.
Mr.
Matte also trotted out the favourite canard of CCP defenders
- that the program is needed to help the disadvantaged
and vulnerable bring cases that protect their rights.
"The program funds claims that otherwise would
never be heard," he asserted, "while the other
side is defended by the government, which has unlimited
resources to defend the law, policy and/or practice
in question." That's not entirely accurate, either.
When the Liberal government's lawyers offered any opposition
to arguments favoured by CCP-funded organizations, that
opposition was usually half-hearted. And typically in
cases involving women's or gays' rights, Ottawa lawyers
have been on the same side as the CCP's, meaning those
opposed to the activist stances taken by CCP groups
have been up against the millions in tax dollars the
CCP doles out annually and the government's "unlimited
resources."
The
activist organizations that run CCP like that imbalance
just the way it is, too, thank you very much. They don't
want to have to go to court with only the same resources
as the citizen groups that oppose them - that is, with
only those resources they can raise from their members.
They have come to see themselves as entitled to the
taxpayers' money because they have told themselves over
and over that they are standing up for the weak and
powerless. Even though the CCP's two biggest beneficiaries
- the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund and the
gay-rights group EGALE - are among the most powerful
rights lobbies in the country, the CCP's defenders have
convinced themselves their program is the little guy's
only champion.
So
now that the Conservatives have ordered the CCP closed,
expect Canada's legal, academic and special-interest
establishments to scream to keep it open. Let's hope
Stephen Harper ignores the screaming and does the right
thing.
Lorne Gunter
Columnist/Editorial Writer, National Post
Columnist, Edmonton Journal
Tele: (780) 916-0719
E-mail: lgunter@shaw.ca
Fax: (780) 481-4735
Also read: Fighting
for the CCP in the House of Commons
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