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Member of Parliament

Rachael Thomas

  • Member of Parliament
  • Member of Parliament
  • Conservative
  • Lethbridge
  • Alberta
  • Voting Attendance: 65%
  • Expenses Last Quarter: $131,565.29

  • Government Page
Context: House Hansard - 190 - May/3/23
Mrs. Rachael Thomas (Lethbridge, CPC)
Madam Speaker, we are here to talk about the court challenges program, which has been brought forward by the hon. member, and I appreciate his words. Right now, we already have a court challenges program in place. However, it is based only on a contribution agreement within the heritage department. This bills looks to permanently enshrine in law a court challenges program here in Canada. What is that? I will quote the bill. It says it is “an independently administered program whose objective is to provide financial support to Canadians to bring before the courts test cases of national significance that aim to clarify and assert certain constitutional and quasi-constitutional official language rights and human rights”. There would be two streams: official languages and human rights. Individuals or groups could come forward and to apply for funding from this supposedly independent body, and then go ahead to essentially go after the federal government or a provincial government in a court challenge. It should be pointed out, just as an important side note, that this program is currently funded to the tune of $5 million per year. We know that about $3.3 million is spent on actual cases, which means that $1.7 million is being used on administrative costs. That is a lot of money tied up in administration. I have many significant questions, as do Canadians, about that money and its wastefulness. If this program is about equipping Canadians or empowering Canadians to be able to seek justice, then the money should be going toward that and not the hefty fees for administering this program. Nevertheless, I will also point out that the government has said that it is supposedly doubling this amount. That is what the 2023 budget says. What is the amount it is committing to in the 2023 budget? It is $4.9 million. It currently spends $5 million, and it is committing to $4.9 million, yet it says it is somehow doubling the funding to this program. I point that out because it is as if the government just says something and relies on being believed to pull the wool over Canadians' eyes. Going from $5 million per year to $4.9 million a year is not doubling the program. The numbers speak for themselves. While the Prime Minister and the government may claim one thing, they are really doing another. It is incredibly disingenuous of them. I want to point that out. Nevertheless, the bill itself is deserving of our attention today. We have to look at the history to fully understand it. It originated with Trudeau senior, Pierre Elliott Trudeau. The reason Mr. Trudeau senior brought this bill forward was because he was faced with Bill 101, which threatened the unity of this country. It looked to make French the sole official language in Quebec. The prime minister at the time, Trudeau senior, did not want to challenge this himself, so he decided to put in this crafty mechanism called the court challenges program. It gave money to third party groups to challenge Bill 101. In other words, the prime minister, with his left hand, was saying he was in support of Quebec and its independence, and with his right hand, was handing over millions of dollars to have these third party groups challenge Quebec. That is the birth of this bill. It is incredibly disingenuous once again. That is where it started. It has morphed over the years. Sometimes it has been backed up and supported, and sometimes it has been scraped or supported less. Nevertheless, it has existed in some form since the late 1970s. One of the problems with this bill is that it undermines Parliament. This is where laws are made in this country. This is the place that has been entrusted by the Canadian electorate to make decisions regarding legislation. When we take that responsibility or authority, and we put it into the hands of the courts, we are doing a disservice, and even an injustice, to the Canadian people. I would raise that as a significant concern, and I have many more concerns. They have to do with transparency, accountability and independence. I will explore those. First, it should be noted that this bill is often used as a direct attack on Quebec and its culture and language rights. For example, even right now, the court challenges program is being used by activists to fight against Bill 21, which is a Quebec bill. It is currently being used to fight that bill. The other thing I will point out is that this program is often used by woke groups to push woke agendas. Of course, that is supported by the panels that exist. Why is it supported by panels that make these decisions? I would argue it is because those panels are not in fact independent and are not in fact transparent. Again, there is a shroud of secrecy around the court challenges program and how it functions. Let me explain more. With regard to transparency, panels exist: one panel for language rights cases and one panel for human rights cases. How are the individuals on those panels selected? I do not know. The reason I do not know is that this is not available. The government claims it is supposed to be available, but my staff and I have checked the government's website numerous times over the last several months and it has always been down. We decided to go on the Wayback Machine, thinking perhaps the site was just down momentarily, but we were not able to find anything on the Wayback Machine. I wonder about that. Is the government purposely being secretive in the selection of these panel members or is the site just down? It is interesting. I am sure someone in IT would be able to fix that should they wish to do so. Further to that, yes, there is some secrecy with these panels, but with regard to the supposedly independent organization, which is currently the University of Ottawa, how was it selected? Again, there are crickets. I am not sure. I could not tell the House because it is not readily available in the public domain. I must highlight, then, that there is also an issue around transparency regarding which cases are funded. That was never made public knowledge. That was never made knowledge here in Parliament. There is also this shroud of secrecy around the level of funding, so not only what gets funded but also to what extent. How much money is going toward each of these cases? Again, it is secret. We have a program taking tax dollars and putting those tax dollars toward these cases, but there is no transparency as to the decision-making process. Canadians deserve better than that. Transparency is one issue, but another issue would be independence. One would expect the administrating body, which is the University of Ottawa, to be functioning fully independently of the government. Well, a bit of research shows us that this simply is likely not the case. The University of Ottawa is functioning as this body. This is the university whose former president was a man by the name of Allan Rock. He was a cabinet minister under Chrétien who was convicted of an ethics violation for taking a free trip with the Irving family, which covered his transportation and his hotel. Does that sound familiar? We see a lot of that. Allan Rock is known for initiating legislation that put the Trudeau Foundation in place. He is also known, of course, for his relationship with the Chinese. It is super interesting, is it not? We have this super independent body with these secretive criteria that are not transparent and are being used to select panels, and further to that, there are two panels making decisions. When I look at the biographies of these panellists, all of them read as if the Liberal Party of Canada platform was just copied and pasted under their names. There is no doubt about it: These panels are not independently selected. There is no merit-based process being utilized, unless it is the same merit-based process used for the supposedly independent senators over in the other place, and we all know how independent that is. The Speaker will excuse this side of the House for the conclusion we must draw, which is that this program is absolutely ludicrous. It lacks transparency, it lacks accountability, it lacks independence and it must not go on.
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