CLIPPING: Gunter: Stop funding Court Challenges Program

Kill the Court Challenges Program

Lorne Gunter
National Post

Friday, September 08, 2006

The Conservative government is considering axing the Court Challenges
Program (CCP).

Good. The sooner the better.

Most Canadians have probably never heard of the CCP. And it's budget
is only a little under $3-million a year. Yet no other federal
program or law has done more damage to Canadian democracy. No other
has so fundamentally altered Canadian society without recourse to
Parliament.

The CCP has since 1985 funded dozens of high-profile court cases
challenging the validity of federal and provincial laws in the name
of feminism, gay rights, visible minorities, refugees, prisoners and
the criminally accused.

Although its funding comes entirely from taxpayers, the CCP was
hijacked early on by leftist cause-pleaders at odds with the broad
Canadian public on such issues as gay marriage, prisoner voting,
detention of criminals and a Criminal Code prohibition on spanking
children, abortion on demand, rape shield, immigration rights,
prohibitions on free speech in the name of protecting minority
sensibilities and the entire grab bag of fashionable causes that fall
under the heading of "political correctness."

CCP-funded groups have achieved through the courts new rights and
laws they would never have been able to win democratically.

In that way, the CCP is fundamentally anti-democratic.

Ian Brodie -- who is now Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Chief of
Staff and part of the decision-making on CCP's budget -- was once a
political science professor at the University of Western Ontario. He
specialized in political influence on the courts.

In a book he wrote during this earlier career, called Friends of the
Court, Mr. Brodie outlined how CCP administrators had aggressively
"created networks of interest groups and encouraged new groups to
pursue public interest legislation." They doled out millions to
radical organizations and urged them to start Charter challenges that
targeted traditional Canadian values and laws.

"Over time," Brodie reported, CCP managers and their interest group
friends became so chummy that "these networks of groups became
increasingly involved in running the program." In effect, the
organizations that stood to benefit most from the program -- both in
terms of funding and court decisions that sided with their causes --
gained inordinate control over it.

After 1993, when the Liberals returned to power, special interests
were put in charge, and their funding decisions made secret.

Not only did left-leaning interest groups want to keep CCP cash
flowing into their legal departments, they understood that if they
controlled the CCP granting process, they could keep groups opposed
to their viewpoints from receiving equal funding, thereby giving
their own causes an unfair advantage in court.

Over time, the CCP and its fundees have become a very cozy,
close-knit little clan. The program almost never funds cases brought
by individuals, only those supported by powerful rights-seeking
lobbies, and almost always the same dozen or so lobbies.

Upwards of 15% of the program's budget goes to finding litigants who
are willing to launch cases against federal and provincial government
statutes opposed by the interest groups whose directors effectively
run the CCP.

One Toronto feminist lawyer, a founder of LEAF, the Women's Legal
Education and Action Fund -- which is CCP's largest recipient -- is
frequently funded by CCP to represent other beneficiaries, such as
the Canadian Abortion Rights Action League. She has also used herself
as a test case. In the early 1990s, she went to court to overturn
Canadian tax laws on childcare expenses and was represented by
another LEAF lawyer who was paid in part by the CCP.

Ted Morton and Rainer Knopff, two University of Calgary political
scientists, wrote in their book The Charter Revolution, that the CCP
also "played a lead role" in the formation of the Canadian Prisoners'
Rights Network, the Charter Committee on Poverty Issues, the Working
Group on Aboriginal and Treaty Rights, and the Equality Rights
Committee of the Canadian Ethno-cultural Council.

The CCP was even the principal funder in 1992's Schacter case, in
which CCP-paid intervenors convinced Supreme Court judges to grant
themselves "reading in" powers to create new rights in Canadian law
where none were approved by Parliament or the legislatures. Not
coincidentally, it is special interest litigators whose cases are
underwritten by CCP who have been the principal beneficiaries of this
new judicial muscle to create rights out of thin air.

The CCP, with its biases and secret agendas, has no place in a
pluralistic society. Ottawa should turn off its tap.

lgunter@shaw.ca

© National Post 2006

Copyright © 2006 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest
MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.

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