The Court Challenges Programme

The folks over at My Blahg have been going on about the cancellation of the Court Challenges Programme. (Site). Lorne Gunter of the National Post provides this explanation:

The Bear Blog » The root of all evil ?

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.

This seems a perfectly good reason for axing a programme. Consider this: if the NDP were to form a government and found that the Fraser Institute had been receiving most of its funding from the Federal Government, then, I would suspect that they'd axe that funding. It would seem reasonable of them to do that.

All that being said, the principle for which the CCP was formed is an excellent one. The idea is that freedom and equality belong to us all. The courts are an instrument that help to insure that equality. But since the freedom to challenge legislation in the courts is meaningless without the financial power to do so, the CCP is an essential element of our system of freedoms. Because no one knows when they might be without the resources and with the need to challenge legislation, we are all less free now than we were before. This is a disappointing state of affairs. A non-biased CCP-type mechanism needs to be established in the wake of these cuts.

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