Justice committee  Based on testimony you've heard before the committee and on briefs I've read about the concerns in respect of the lack of inclusion of gender expression in the definition, it is my understanding that the goal would be to avoid opportunities for avoiding criminal liability by simply saying they weren't really trying to change a person's identity; they were just trying to reduce certain forms of expression.

Justice committee  Madam Chair, may I respond?

Justice committee  Thank you for that question. Perhaps I wasn't clear when I was explaining the amendment. I first attempted to explain the legal scope of the amendment, so that you would understand what it captures in law. I then attempted to explain what I understand to be one of the main objectives of including a separate way of showing that a particular intervention is conversion therapy.

Justice committee  Thank you, Chair, for the question. I will comment on the impact of the amendment that is before you. I do have it before me as well. What it would do is amend the definition to include “practices, treatments or services designed to change gender expression to cisgender and practices, treatments or services designed to reduce or repress non-cisgender expression.”

Foreign Affairs committee  I believe that's an excellent question. I am not an expert on the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. There are experts on the IRPA in the room. Would you like to hear from them?

Foreign Affairs committee  In subclause 2(4), it should say “(1) or (2)”. It's just a tiny technical thing.

Foreign Affairs committee  I don't want to hold you up, but I just wanted to point out that because you removed the definition of informed consent and retained the financial transaction offence, you do have a numbering problem. It's very minor, but it goes—

Foreign Affairs committee  These are very interesting factual situations. Of course, a court would have to consider all the facts of the case. If a case like this were to come before the court, and the court were to consider what amounts of money—let's say it's money—were paid in that situation, and determined that it was merely to reimburse those expenses, then my previous comments would hold.

Foreign Affairs committee  As I've said, I do think “obtain for consideration” has a meaning in law, and that reimbursement of legitimate medical expenses would not be captured by that phrase. I would like to point out that the Istanbul declaration and other health-related instruments really are focusing on the non-commercialization principle which we have in Canada in all of the human tissue gift acts.

Foreign Affairs committee  We're assuming that the person went abroad, had an organ transplant there with a family member, reimbursed expenses at a reasonable rate and returned home. We're also pretending that this offence is in force.

Foreign Affairs committee  Would you be caught by that offence in that scenario? I do not believe so.

Foreign Affairs committee  Unfortunately, I'm here to answer legal and technical questions about the bill and the amendments proposed. I'm not actually sure what the policy objective is with this amendment, which also makes it complicated.

Foreign Affairs committee  I agree that “for consideration” would likely not cover reimbursement of expenses. That language is contract language. What it means is that a person exchanges something for something else. Reimbursing expenses wouldn't fall within that category, in my view, although I'm not a contract law expert; I'm more focused on criminal law.

Foreign Affairs committee  I'm not sure I understand exactly. In the trafficking provisions, it specifically states that victim consent is irrelevant. It's a basic principle of criminal law that, if you are exploited, and by that I mean according to the definition in section 279.04, even if you consented to the conditions that created your exploitation, that doesn't make it not a criminal offence.

Foreign Affairs committee  No. I don't believe that it does jeopardize the way in which these provisions would be implemented, because it would be the health law definition that would be used to interpret each of these offences. As I've stated, the health law understanding of what informed consent means is clear.