Bill S-204 (Historical)

An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (trafficking in human organs)

This enactment amends the Criminal Code to create new offences in relation to trafficking in human organs. It also amends the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act to provide that a permanent resident or foreign national is inadmissible to Canada if the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration is of the opinion that they have engaged in any activities relating to trafficking in human organs.

Criminal Code

[Sameer Zuberi, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Madam Speaker, I would like to start by thanking the member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan.

I also want to thank Senator Ataullahjan, who has created this conversation within our House, the lower house, the House of Commons.

This Senate bill, Bill S-223, an act to amend the Criminal Code and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (trafficking in human organs), is a critical piece of legislation that would help us address a grave and serious human rights concern. It is new legislation that adds to an existing body of law, which addresses criminality but not with respect to organ harvesting outside of Canada's territory.

I want to acknowledge our collective commitment to ensuring that these important reforms become law. This is a commitment from all members of the House, from what I can see. The important and beautiful thing about this legislation and discussing it is we are focused on the public good, putting aside our partisan squabbles to promote what is right and just.

First, I would like to review the history of the legislative reform proposed in this bill.

The issue of organ trafficking has been before Parliament for a decade. Prior to Bill S-223, there were two Senate public bills that proposed nearly identical reforms. They were Bill S-240, introduced in 2017, and Bill S-204, introduced in 2020. In addition, two private member's bills introduced in 2017 and 2013 proposed similar reforms. They were Bill C-350 and Bill C-561. We all agree that organ trafficking is a heinous crime. It requires a legislative response.

As I said earlier, this piece of legislation would create something new within the Criminal Code that speaks specifically to the trafficking of organs extraterritorially, or outside the territory of Canada. Additionally, it would amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act so those who are seeking to reside permanently in Canada or foreign nationals would be inadmissible to our beautiful country for engaging in conduct that constitutes one of the offences proposed in this legislation. These offences target anybody who obtains organs, or who participates in or facilitates the trafficking of organs, from a person who did not provide informed consent. This legislation also seeks to target those who obtained organs that are purchased and those who participate in or facilitate the transfer of purchased organs.

These are coercive practices. They are difficult to prove, but we want to send a clear and strong signal that we as a country do not accept them.

Unfortunately, we know that people who are wealthier unwittingly or sometimes wittingly engage in this practice. Those who are victims of this practice are almost always deeply vulnerable. The transplant of organs without consent is abhorrent. Oftentimes, it leads to devastating impacts on those who had their organs trafficked. They are uncompensated, they live with lifelong problems and they sometimes die.

The member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan and I participated in an important study on the Uighur people. This was over two years ago at the parliamentary subcommittee on international human rights.

We heard testimony from a survivor of the concentration camps within Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. He recounted to us, in testimony, how he was apprehended. He was asked to sign a forced confession and refused to do so. He was medically examined to such an extent that he thought he would be dissected on that table, that his eyes were going to be removed or that his organs were going to be harvested on the spot during the examination.

This piece of legislation seeks to target any behaviour that harvests organs from people.

I recognize that the Criminal Code may apply currently to some of the conduct that this bill is seeking to legislate. Right now, the Criminal Code has assault offences that apply when organs are harvested here in Canada with coercion. This piece of legislation, as I mentioned earlier, also looks at what happens outside of Canada.

Right now, there is no international covenant from the UN that speaks specifically to organ harvesting in its essence as the main thrust of the covenant. However, there are two covenants that do touch upon organ harvesting, and Canada is party to both of these UN instruments. The first is the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children. This supplements the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, which was ratified on May 13, 2002.

After this first piece of international law came the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography. This protocol addresses offering, delivering and accepting a child for the purposes of transferring children's organs, particularly article 3. This was ratified on September 14, 2005.

The Council of Europe Convention against Trafficking in Human Organs, adopted in 2014, also speaks directly to organ harvesting.

I will conclude by recognizing the important work that has been done around this, in particular by David Kilgour and David Matas. They have done extensive research around Falun Gong or Falun Dafa practitioners and have dedicated years to highlighting this particular issue around organ harvesting.

We know that David Kilgour served in the House for many years with the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party. He was a person of conviction. He was a person who continued to remain active after serving the House. He was somebody I crossed paths with before entering the House. I remember this gentleman as a sincere person who advocated for the public good and for human rights.

It is important to also mark David Matas, who along with David Kilgour conducted extensive research. It allowed us to build a body of evidence that proved not only anecdotally but also empirically that this is an abhorrent phenomenon occurring right now.

Recently, in the Subcommittee on International Human Rights, we heard how this is currently happening to the Uighur people. In the airports in Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, in Urumqi, if my memory serves me correctly, there were lines on the floor as one entered the airport that specifically demarcated where one could pick up organs. This is abhorrent. This type of practice must stop. This practice might exist currently within a region of the world that we know, but this legislation applies across the board.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I have to admit that I am somewhat surprised that my colleagues' speeches are so short.

I will jump right in and say that the Bloc Québécois supports Bill S‑223, the former Bill S‑204, which should have passed in the last Parliament.

Bill S‑223 explicitly makes it a crime to travel abroad to receive a transplanted organ that was removed without free and informed consent and obtained for consideration. Put simply, it prohibits individuals from engaging in a practice abroad that is prohibited in Canada.

The Criminal Code prohibits the exploitation of individuals, which includes organ and tissue harvesting. This bill provides an additional tool to thwart criminal groups and to combat organ trafficking, which speaks to the social and economic inequalities that still exist on this planet.

The Bloc Québécois hopes that Bill S‑223 will be passed quickly, as the former bill was.

Human Organ Trafficking

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Mr. Speaker, the final petition I am tabling today is with respect to Bill S-223. The bill has had a number of different names and numbers. It is the bill that seeks to make it a criminal offence for a person to go abroad and receive an organ taken without consent. The bill has been in the works for over 15 years, trying to address forced organ harvesting and trafficking. It has been put forward in every Parliament I have been a part of, under Bills S-240 and S-204. Now it has been retabled in the Senate as S-223, and I am hoping against hope that this Parliament will finally be the one that gets it done.

I commend all these petitions to the consideration of hon. members.

Parliament of Canada Act

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise in the House today to speak in support of Bill S-205 and to affirm the importance of the arts for our national life and indeed for all people throughout all time in history. The appreciation of beautiful things and the enjoyment of them is fundamental to the human condition. It is part of what elevates our minds and develops our thoughts and creates space for our greater understanding of goodness and of truth, in unity with beauty.

I was thinking of jumping-off points for talking about this issue. I was reminded that in the Catholic tradition, today is the feast of St. Thomas More. St. Thomas More is known better for some things than for others, although he was a composite figure known for his many different contributions to politics as well as to literature. He is best known for how his career ended: He was executed for refusing to endorse the king's marriage. He did so on a point of principle and a point of conscience. Regardless of whether members agree with the particular stand he took, we can all admire the courage of a politician who takes a stand on a principle and understands that the things they believe in are more important than their career or even their life.

St. Thomas More was also a great humanist. He talked about justice. He talked about human dignity and spoke explicitly about the connection between the ill treatment of people and crime. His writings and comments on those subjects have been sources of inspiration and content for people across the political spectrum. Particularly on the artistic side, he was someone who was able to develop ideas and present political points, indirectly perhaps, in the form of beautiful literary compositions.

If members have not read it, I encourage all to read Utopia. This is where we get the concept of utopia as sort of a political construct. He wrote this relatively short book, Utopia, in which he imagined a voyage to a faraway country called Utopia, and he describes in detail the characteristics, the modes of interaction and the beliefs of this fictitious people. Of course, he was living at a time when it was difficult to make certain kinds of political points directly. As his later career demonstrated, if one believed in certain things and expressed those opinions, there could be very dire consequences, not just in today's sense of people being cancelled but of actually being cancelled.

He spoke about certain ideas and raised certain questions through this description of an imaginary society that operated according to different norms and different rules. There were many questions at the time, and there still are, about what he really meant in many aspects of this book. Was he describing an ideal society? On the other hand, there were things about that society that seemed to be different from things that he defended and advocated as a politician. Maybe he was not describing an ideal society; maybe he was simply trying to expand the creative imagination. He was trying to give flower to possibilities by creating a space in which it was acceptable to think about things that would have been seen as maybe too subversive if he had been commenting directly on norms or policies in his own country.

I think what Utopia demonstrates is the beginning of the tradition of trying to subvert established ideas through the subtlety that is possible through art when it is maybe harder to present those alternative concepts directly. There has since been this whole genre of utopian or dystopian literature, with dystopia, obviously, being the inverse of a utopia. There are many great modern works that pick up on this tradition and use this device of imagining another place, another time, another context to subtly comment on our current realities. Some of the works of Margaret Atwood, of course, are famous in this regard, such as The Handmaid's Tale. The Children of Men is another great dystopian novel that I have read recently, and I think it has a great deal of value in it.

The point I am trying to make is that art has value in and of itself. It is also a vehicle by which questions can be raised and thoughts can be provoked that are not as obvious, not as directly accessible through explicit political speech, and, indeed, possibilities can be opened that are unexamined otherwise or harder to argue for directly.

That can be the case perhaps because of direct repercussions for those who propose contrary ideas, but that can also be the case simply because certain concepts are so out of the mould that it is hard to envision what they would imply unless they are actually described in a more literary format. Thomas Moore is one example of someone who successfully provoked the creative imagination through art and literature.

We can see the value in Parliament creating this position of a visual artist laureate as appreciating our artists, as affirming the value of arts as a mechanism by which Parliament uses its position, its leadership role within the country to affirm the importance of the arts. However, it is also an opportunity to recognize, in our national life, so many of the conversations we have about the big challenging issues facing our country. Questions of justice, questions of human rights and questions of how we behave and respond to certain challenges can be proposed and shaped through art.

With that in mind, I am very supportive of the bill. It is one of many private members' bills before the House, some of which have come from the Senate, that do have great value and that Conservatives are pleased to support. From what I understand, Bill S-205, like Bill S-204, which we were speaking to last week, had the unanimous support of all senators. Like Bill S-204, it also has a great deal of support in the House. By all indication, I think all members will be supportive of the valuable provisions contained in that bill. It is one of those things hopefully parliamentarians can work together on across different important private members' bills as well as across different chambers to move these things forward.

In the context of the legislative timeline we have in front of us, unfortunately it looks like the Prime Minister is trying to malign the work of Parliament to create the impression that Parliament is not working. The reality is that this Parliament has worked substantially to move certain important issues forward; it just has not always worked in a way the government has liked.

One example the sponsor of this bill will be familiar with is the work being done at the Canada-China committee, a committee that was created even though the government did not want it created, a committee that undertook important studies, did important work on the situation in Hong Kong, a committee that has been part of discussions that have happened at other committees as well on recognizing the Uighur genocide, something that happened through the leadership of Parliament and not through the leadership of the government. Now we have a situation of Parliament asserting its rights to access documents. These are important cases of the leadership of this Parliament.

If the Prime Minister is critiquing Parliament, it has less to do with the fact Parliament is not working and more to do with the fact that, from his perspective, Parliament is working too well. Parliament is doing things the government may not like, but nonetheless Parliament has been able to lead, oftentimes through the collaboration of opposition parties and sometimes working with individual members of the government as well.

Nonetheless, we are in the situation now as we approach the end of the spring session where it looks very much like the Prime Minister, in trying to malign the work of Parliament, is trying to position himself to justify calling an election. If that happens, of course, it will put important legislative initiatives that have not yet passed in jeopardy.

We should reflect on the fact that as we possibly come to the end of the spring session, in some cases, we have bills that have been passed in the Senate and are now in the House. If the House could find a way of dealing with them, it would allow us to move forward ahead of the spring session so those bills could become law.

As I have described, this is important legislation. It recognizes the profound role that arts play in our national life, the profound role of beauty in the human experience and also the role arts can play in provoking questions and ideas that might not get discussed otherwise.

Human Organ Trafficking

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Madam Speaker, the next petition I am tabling is in support of Bill S-204, a bill that would make it a criminal offence for a person to go abroad and receive an organ without consent. This bill was debated on Friday. Unfortunately, we did not have the support of the government to expedite it at that time, but hopefully that support will be forthcoming very soon. Petitioners want to see this Parliament be the one that gets Bill S-204 passed.

Budget Implementation Act, 2021, No. 1

[Warren Steinley, Conservative, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

Madam Speaker, I can tell this member is a little sheepish right now because he did not realize that, during the debate on Bill S-204, the Liberals were filibustering their own budget bill. If they actually had knowledge of the parliamentary process, they would have realized that passing that bill unanimously would have let us vote on their budget bill this afternoon, but they are so incompetent, they did not realize they were filibustering their own budget bill.

It is really unbelievable.

Human Organ Trafficking

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Mr. Speaker, the second petition is in support of Bill S-204, a bill that would make it a criminal offence for a person to go abroad and receive an organ in the case where there has not been consent. This bill is currently before the House, and the petitioners would like to see it passed expeditiously. It was passed in the same form unanimously in the House in the previous Parliament, and it has been passed twice unanimously in the Senate.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Mr. Speaker, today I am tabling this petition signed by nearly 100 people, all of whom are concerned about the rise in international trafficking in human organs.

These petitioners are calling on all parliamentarians to pass Bill S-204, an act to amend the Criminal Code and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act with regard to trafficking in human organs, which is currently before the House and which seeks to prohibit the trafficking of human organs removed without consent or as a result of a financial transaction.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Madam Speaker, the next petition is in support of Bill S-204, a bill that would make it a criminal offence for a person to go abroad and receive an organ without consent. The petitioners are supportive of that bill and want to see it passed as quickly as possible. The bill is currently before the House, having unanimously passed in the Senate. It unanimously passed in the House in a previous form.

[Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

Madam Speaker, I rise today to present a petition from constituents concerned about forced organ harvesting. I think we all agree this horrific practice must be stopped.

I thank my colleagues, the member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan and Senator Salma Ataullahjan, for their advocacy on this issue, including Bill S-204, recently tabled in the House. The bill would create a new Criminal Code offence for trafficking human organs, while also amending the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act to prohibit entry into Canada of any permanent resident or foreign national who is believed to have engaged in this abhorrent practice.

Let us do the right thing and promptly pass this important legislation. Lives hang in the balance.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Mr. Speaker, the third petition I am presenting is in support of Bill S-204, a bill that has passed the Senate unanimously, and has previously passed the House unanimously in the form of Bill S-240.

The petitioners are hoping that this bill will be adopted and that this will indeed be the one that finally gets it done.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Mr. Speaker, it seems my reputation precedes me. I have many petitions to present today, and although I intend to go through them quickly, I do not think I will be able to get through all of them in the time we have, but here we go.

The first petition is in support of Bill S-204, a bill that would make it a criminal offence for a person to go abroad and receive an organ in a case where there has not been consent. It would also create a mechanism by which a person could be deemed inadmissible to Canada if that person has been involved in forced organ harvesting and trafficking. Petitioners are in support of Bill S-204. They would like to see it passed as quickly as possible.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Mr. Speaker, the final petition is in support of Bill S-204, a bill currently before this House, which has just passed the Senate unanimously. Bill S-204 would make it a criminal offence for a person to go abroad and receive an organ where there has not been consent. This bill has passed the House unanimously in its current form as Bill S-240 in the last Parliament. Now we simply need to complete the reconciliation process by passing Bill S-204 in this Parliament. The petitioners are hoping this Parliament is the one that finally gets it done and deals with the abhorrent practice of forced organ harvesting and trafficking. It is an issue on which all parliamentarians agree and has had unanimous support in both Houses before in this form, so let us try to get it done in this Parliament.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Mr. Speaker, the second petition is on Bill S-204, a bill that would make it a criminal offence for a person to go abroad and receive an organ taken without consent. The bill has passed the Senate unanimously and is now before the House. I note that it is identical to Bill S-240 and it is in the same form that the bill was in when it passed the House unanimously in the last Parliament.

The bill has now, in the same form, though, in different Parliaments, passed both Houses unanimously. The petitioners hope to see this Parliament finally be the one to actually get the bill into law.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Madam Speaker, the second petition I am tabling is about Bill S-204, a bill that has now passed the Senate and is currently before the House.

It is a bill that would make it a criminal offence for a person to go abroad and receive an organ in a case where there had not been consent. It also creates a mechanism by which a person could be made inadmissible to Canada if they were involved in forced organ harvesting and trafficking. This bill has now passed the Senate unanimously twice. It passed in the House once before unanimously, in the same form, in the previous Parliament.

Petitioners are hoping Bill S-204, which is the same as Bill S-240 from the previous Parliament, will be passed in this Parliament with the support of all members.