Good riddance (II)

Ezra Levant is shedding no tears for the Court Challenges Program. Me neither:

...Prime Minister Stephen Harper himself was once the target of CCP funding. When Harper ran the conservative National Citizens Coalition, he challenged the federal government’s “gag law” that capped spending during elections by advocacy groups other than political parties. The CCP funded the left-of-centre lobby group Democracy Watch to intervene against Harper. Of course the government had plenty of its own lawyers in court that day, but the CCP’s slush fund allowed them to buy a few sock puppets, too.

There was a special irony to the CCP giving government money to favoured interest groups like Democracy Watch to go to court to prohibit blacklisted interest groups like the National Citizens Coalition from spending their own money.

In recent years, the CCP adopted a new policy of secrecy: It no longer disclosed which litigants it funded in court. “Public” groups showed up in court, with lawyers paid for by the government, intervening on behalf of the government, and nobody was allowed to know that they were paid agents of the government. Add the charge of collusion to champerty.

[...]

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to wonder what the CBA would say about the CCP if it had been a tool of Conservative interest groups — funding challenges to Medicare’s monopoly, like Dr. Jacques Chaoulli’s groundbreaking case (funded all the way to the Supreme Court by Chaoulli and his own family). It’s not judicial activism that the CBA likes. It’s leftist judicial activism.

Damian P.

Posted by damian at November 15, 2006 10:58 AM