This bill does not in any way seek to restrict people from receiving organs from abroad if there is consent. The requirement is that they don't receive organs from abroad if there is not consent. Bill C-350, which was a bill I proposed that was wholly the same as a bill proposed by Irwin Cotler, envisioned a system where somebody would bring a certificate with them attesting to that consent. There's some potential value in that, but there's also some complexity around assessing the validity of a certificate in countries where that just may not happen as a matter of course.
The way this legislation is set up, it would be incumbent on the prosecution to demonstrate, based on a typical standard of proof, that there was exploitation or there wasn't proper consent.
Does that mean that there are cases where someone might be involved in organ trafficking and it's difficult to prove or it's difficult to get a conviction? Yes, that's something that prosecutors deal with every day. Certainly for somebody who innocently went abroad and received an organ for which there was consent, doing so in another jurisdiction that has the rule of law or receiving from a family member, the risk that the person would get caught up in a prosecution here is totally nil. If anything, the risk is greater the other way, that someone would do something nefarious and not get caught in a prosecution. At least it's better to have this law than not have this law, even though we're not going to be able to successfully prosecute every case. Again, that's true of any law.