The Court Challenges Program was established in 1985 by the Department of the Secretary of State. It operated as an autonomous body that was funded by the Department and administered by the Canadian Council on Social Development. Its mandate was to select cases and allocate funding to individuals or groups who wanted to try test cases in the areas of language and equality rights. These cases could challenge the Canadian Constitution, the Manitoba Act and/or the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Rather than promoting court action, the Program sought to clarify the language and equality provisions of Canada's constitutional documents through the courts, as well as to promote and enhance the status of language and human rights across the country. The Court Challenges Program was cancelled in April of 1992.
Although the Program originally relied on a single filing system, in which a file was created for each applicant, they divided their files into two separate series -- the public and confidential files. This new filing scheme was introduced in order to provide those researchers who were interested in the cases that they funded access to the public documents.
The confidential case files in this accession contain minutes from CCP panel meetings, records of decisions, internal memos, Equality and Language Rights policies, Decisions by the Coordinating Committee, history and legal report for the case, some court transcripts, correspondence from the Court Challenges Program to the applicant, correspondence and notes from the lawyer representing the client, reports from the judge to the lawyer, financial statements, notes to file and legal opinions written by the lawyer.
Due to the particularly sensitive nature of these files, the confidential documents will be closed to the public until the year 2022. This decision was made as a means of protecting the privacy of the client as well as solicitor-client privilege. Many of these files are duplicated by the Public File Series which contains all of the non-confidential information many of the cases.
