Cooperative efforts

The Cons' efforts to shut down the Standing Committee on Official Languages have apparently met total failure, as the three opposition parties have agreed to set up a "consultative committee" to take over while the Cons sulk in the corner over the vote of non-confidence in former chair Guy Lauzon:

We do not accept being muzzled by the Conservative government. This is the reason why the three opposition parties decided to set up a consultative committee on Official Languages, which will be chaired by the current vice- chair of the Standing Committee, Pablo Rodriguez.

The mandate of this committee is to take up where the Standing Committee left off, namely studying the impact of the decision to abolish the Court Challenges Program, and then considering the Commissioner’s report, as per article 88 of the Official Languages Act. This consultative committee will begin its hearings tomorrow (before Parliament goes on break) and will prepare the work of the Standing Committee, which cannot be paralyzed forever.

It remains to be seen how long the newly-formed committee will operate, or whether the Cons will realize they're probably better off nominating a new chairman - both from a perception standpoint, and to offer at least some chance to include the Cons' spin within any committee hearings and reports.

But whether or not the new committee ends up generating much by way of final work products, it looks certain to put some serious pressure on the Cons to work with the opposition. And all three opposition parties deserve credit for working together to make sure that the Cons' stubbornness doesn't lead to a lack of discussion about language issues.

On non-confidence

Politics Watch reports that Con MP Guy Lauzon will rightly face a vote of non-confidence from Yvon Godin and the other opposition members of the Official Languages Committee for his sudden cancellation of hearings on the Court Challenges Program:

On Tuesday, NDP MP Yvon Godin held a press conference on Parliament Hill to announce he had given a notice of motion to the clerk of the committee to express no-confidence in Lauzon.

The motion calls for Lauzon to "be relieved of his duties" for the cancellation of Tuesday's meeting on the Court Challenges Program.

"The chair acted against the will of the committee and overstepped his role as chair," Godin's motion reads. "As a consequence, he has lost the confidence of the committee."

Godin said he expects the committee will deal with the motion when it is scheduled to meet next Tuesday. If Lauzon cancels that meeting, too, then committee members could bypass him and have a meeting without the chair's consent within 48 hours if four MPs agree to it. Either way, a vote of no-confidence is expected next week.

Bloc MP Richard Nadeau said Lauzon's actions this week means he's "not fit for the job any more."

"How can we have confidence in someone who's not even man enough to tell us (about cancelling the meetings) in front of us in the committee," the Bloc MP told PoliticsWatch.

Liberal MP Raymonde Folco said Lauzon's actions to single-handedly take control of the committee's agenda were "utterly unethical and unacceptable."

"I will be supporting Mr. Godin and all the members of the Liberal caucus will be supporting Mr. Godin," she told reporters after question period.

If there's anything faintly disappointing about the move, it's that Lauzon will face repercussions for an action less deserving of censure than those of numerous Con members of cabinet who have gone without formal punishment.

But it can't hurt for the Cons to receive a reminder that they can't rule Parliament by fiat any more than they can the country as a whole - and that for all the other parties's differences, they can readily agree not to let the Cons off the hook for trying to avoid any accountability for their actions.

Selective challenges

Thomas Walkom notes that for all the Cons' hatred for the dearly-departed Court Challenges Program, they don't seem to have the slightest concern about tax money supporting the efforts of right-wing interest groups to challenge Canadian laws:

When Prime Minister Stephen Harper axed the Court Challenges Program last fall, Ottawa's rationale was that taxpayers shouldn't have to support interest groups trying to take elected governments to court...

(W)hat Baird didn't mention is that taxpayers are still subsidizing interest groups that want to take governments to court. The big difference is that, now, proportionally more public money goes to fund conservative causes – including attempts to dismantle medicare.

The poster boy for what is, in effect, a hidden court challenges program is the Calgary-based Canadian Constitution Foundation. Founded in 2002, it opposes what it sees as the watering down of constitutional principles by governments and left-wing interest groups.

To that end, it is directly subsidizing a long-running court challenge against the 2000 self-government treaty between Ottawa, British Columbia and the Nisga'a people of that province. Executive director John Carpay says it is also helping to fund a constitutional challenge against Alberta's medicare system, launched last September by Calgary accountant Bill Murray...

Until its demise last fall, the Court Challenges Program was front and centre among those dark forces. Its sin, in Carpay's words, was to give money "to special interest groups to advance their politically correct causes through the courts. ...

"Requiring people to pay for advocacy with which they disagree does violence to a person's conscience," he wrote in the Calgary Herald. "How would (pro-choice) supporters feel if their tax dollars were used for court challenges to recognize the right of unborn children?"

Which would be a reasonable argument if the legal playing field were level and if no advocacy group of any political persuasion received government money.

But in the real world, neither of those conditions holds. First, the playing field is not level. Constitutional court cases are prohibitively expensive for anyone without access to a lot of money. Second, the end of the Court Challenges Program may have reduced federal subsidies, but it has not ended them. It has merely redirected them.

The mechanism for this redirection is the registered charity. Thanks to the Canadian Constitution Foundation's charitable status, anyone who supports its particular political causes gets a tax writeoff that, in effect, all other taxpayers – including those who disagree with its aims – have to cover.

The more successful the foundation is in encouraging wealthy Canadians to support its particular brand of political advocacy, the greater will be the tax loss that other Canadians will have to make up.

Walkom notes that some left-wing groups, notably the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund, also receive charitable tax status which goes to fund legal challenges. But to date there's been a major practical difference: while LEAF takes only intervenor status at the appellate level, it doesn't directly fund cases from the beginning - meaning that an individual has to have enough resources individually to get a case to that level before LEAF will get involved.

In contrast, the Canadian Constitutional Foundation funds litigation from day one - even though from the sound of it, its participants and beneficiaries don't appear to fall into the class of people particularly needing the assistance to get a case into court.

Of course, even if there were a perfect parallel between the left wing and right wing in the charity-based funding structure, that wouldn't eliminate the need for a Court Challenges Program to assist individuals whose cases can't be easily fit within the mandate of an existing charity. And it only fits with the Cons' polarizing philosophy that their "balance" manages to maintain governmental support for those with a political cause on both sides of the spectrum, while so proudly removing any funding for challenges by Canadians who don't have an interest group (of whatever political stripe) supporting them.