Mr. Chair, I don't interrupt Mr. Godin when he has his seven minutes and ask him to stay on topic. I don't ask him to immediately ask a question of the witness. He's allowed to expound upon his thoughts, and that's what I'm doing now. It's my seven minutes.
Thank you for the input, though.
We heard some of the concerns today from Mr. Smith, but we have had other witnesses express the same concerns in that the court challenges program offers selectivity to certain causes, and certain causes advance and other causes do not advance.
That's what I mean. I don't think it's fair to say that if you have a concern with the court challenges program, you are therefore against all of the positive gains—and we can list some in the official languages communities—and against all of that. No, I don't think anybody has said that. What we're saying is that there is concern with the court challenges program in how the program particularly is administered. So I wanted to clarify that.
I think there were two key concerns we heard from witnesses. One of them is on the selectivity. In other words, this third party organization has this ability to select certain causes and not others. The other concern is that there's not enough transparency. The third party committee does not have to offer reasoning as to which cases it selected and which it didn't select, and it does not have to give an account of which cases it rejected. So it's somewhat shrouded in secrecy. There's not a lot of transparency associated with the court challenges program.
These came to mind because Mr. Smith had mentioned some of his concerns. Actually, I think we've heard some of the same concerns coming from other groups that have been here in front of the committee. And I just know that in my work as MP, I've heard these other concerns expressed about the court challenges program.
So I thank Mr. Smith for his comments. I don't have a particular question. I'll end there.
I don't know if one of my colleagues wants to pick up or wait for the second round.
At any rate, I'm done. Thank you.