Legal funding changed history
Re: Legal program is an injustice to us all, Editorial, Feb. 11 As one of the many Canadians who has profited in very practical and human terms from the support of the Court Challenges Program ( CCP) in the past, I strongly disagree with your editorial. After 35 years of living together as “longtime companions,” in 1998, my boyfriend and I decided to get married. As working- class people, we were able to find $ 20,000 for legal fees by mortgaging our home, but this would never be enough to fight the federal government’s vast resources through three levels of endless court hearings. However, in 2000, the CCP granted us the seed money necessary to hire a lawyer and go to court.
You are right, the CCP grants are small and do not cover the full costs of a serious legal challenge. But you did not tell your readers that, if your arguments are just and you win in court, you also win “costs” from the losing the party, which covers most of the legal fees. As far as being of “practical value to Canadians,” our victory in first instance and on appeal as well as during the reference to the Supreme Court allowed same-sex couples across Canada to marry and establish legal families with the full protection of the law. This is no small feat considering the centuries of discrimination, imprisonment and punishment that we homosexuals have lived with.
I agree with you that some Canadian laws are unconstitutional and that the CCP could be improved. However, instead of offering misleading and questionable criticism, you would do Canadians a far greater service by providing constructive criticism of just how the CCP could be improved rather than simply running down the positive revisions that the Liberal government has made to this program that Stephen Harper “nixed,” as you put it, in 2006.