For the benefit of anybody who was wondering just why the CCP had to go under the axe, the National Post had the answer on page A16 of their September 8th edition in an article by Lorne Gunter. Despite all the howling that will arise from the left at the news of its demise, the fact remains that the CCP was more like the CCCP than Canada…
Kill the Court Challenges Program
National Post
Fri 08 Sep 2006
Page: A16
Section: Editorials
Byline: Lorne Gunter
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.â€
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.
Well, this isn’t surprising. In their never ending quest to find some deep, dark secret in PM Stephen Harper’s closet, the MSM may have finally latched onto something that will get Canadians‘ attention, and maybe keep it, too (though I haven’t yet figured out how they’re going to put some “Bush-loving, neocon, American Republican conspiracy angle on it yet, but I’m sure they’ll think of something). CTV leads off with:
A tip o the old chapeau to 
Hey, everybody. Not a lot of time right now but I know everybody is looking for news on the Toronto rally today, so I’m gonna just throw up a bunch of links. Knock yourselves out…
Because loyalty to God and family often conflicts with the kind of loyalty to the herd which is vital to these socialist leeches, the family has got to go, and the churches with them. Read Orwell’s 
