Foreign Affairs Committee on Nov. 16th, 2022

[The Chair, Liberal, Ali Ehsassi]

I call the meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 37 of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development.

Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format. Members are attending in person in the room, as well as remotely using the Zoom application.

I would like to take a few moments to provide some explanations for witnesses and members.

First, please wait until I recognize you by name before speaking. For those participating by video conference, click on the microphone icon to activate your mike, and please mute yourself when you are not speaking.

Interpretation for those on Zoom is at the bottom of your screen, and you have a choice of either floor, English or French. Those in the room can use the earpiece and select the desired channel.

In accordance with our routine motion, I'd like to inform members of the committee that all witnesses have completed the required connection tests in advance of our meeting.

Pursuant to the order of reference of Wednesday, May 18, 2022, the committee will commence consideration of Bill S-223, an act to amend the Criminal Code and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.

With regard to the drafting of amendments, I would like to remind members to contact Alexandra Schorah, the legislative counsel, should there be any amendments to the draft or should there be anything that they would like to bring to her attention and ask for her guidance on.

Now it is my pleasure to welcome our two witnesses on this specific bill. We have the Honourable Salma Ataullahjan, senator; as well as Mr. Garnett Genuis, who is well known to you all, the MP for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan. You will each be provided five minutes, after which we will proceed with questions from the members.

Senator, you have the floor. You have five minutes. When you only have 30 seconds left, I will put this up to provide you with some context. Please do proceed. The floor is yours.

[Senator Salma Ataullahjan, Senator]

Thank you.

Good afternoon, honourable members.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to appear before this committee as a witness and as a sponsor of Bill S-223, an act to amend the Criminal Code and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (trafficking in human organs).

Bill S-223 proposes to strengthen Canada's response to organ trafficking by creating additional Criminal Code offences in relation to such conduct and extends extraterritorial jurisdiction over the new offences. It also seeks to amend 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 finds that they have engaged in trafficking of human organs.

Currently there are no laws in Canada banning Canadians from travelling abroad, purchasing organs for transplantation and returning to Canada. This is shameful, especially when we have joined most of the world in condemning the sale of organs and transplant tourism.

Over 100 countries, including the United Kingdom, Norway and Portugal, have passed legislation banning the trade of organs. Additionally, several countries have responded with legislation strengthening existing laws that ban organ trafficking and sales. There are a number of governmental and professional bodies with initiatives to regulate domestic and international organ transplantation and tackle organ trafficking, including, for example, the Council of Europe Convention against Trafficking in Human Organs.

In 2012, the World Health Organization claimed that an illegal organ was sold every hour. Overall, the number of illegal transplants worldwide is believed to be around 10,000 a year. It is important to note that this is a conservative number, as many illegal organ sales remain unreported.

Despite our inability to eradicate human rights violations around the world, we can enact change at home. It is entirely within our power to avoid complicity with transplant tourism within our own borders.

Sadly, an illegal organ transplant is not a lifeline for Canadians needing a vital organ. Instead, the recipient can often suffer from surgical complications, infections and poorer outcomes overall. These patients experience loss of the organ and death at higher rates than domestic organ transplant recipients.

Despite the growing body of information on the ramifications of transplant tourism, Canadians continue to travel abroad for commercial organ transplants. Doctors have reported that three to five people a year still arrive at St. Michael's Hospital having obtained a kidney in countries such as China, Pakistan or India. St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver also reports seeing three to five returning organ tourists a year.

A study on the clinical outcomes of patients treated at an Ontario transplant centre after receiving organs through commercial transactions abroad found that most of the patients needed follow-up care on an urgent basis and some required lengthy hospital stays. This not only puts Canadian citizens at risk, but also contributes to burdening our already-struggling health care system.

To make matters worse, my entire allotted speaking time could be spent recounting story after story of victim organ donors, such as the missing six-year-old boy who was found alone in a field crying, with both of his eyes removed, presumably for their corneas. There was the young girl who was kidnapped and taken to another country for the sole purpose of harvesting her organs. There was the group of terrified women and men who were found locked inside an apartment, being held through deception and threats, waiting to be taken to a clinic to unwillingly have a kidney removed.

As a prosecutor in the Kosovo case said that organ trafficking is “the exploitation of the poor, the indigent, the vulnerable and the marginalized in our society”. He said that the recipients of those organs are wealthy, influential citizens from foreign countries and largely western countries, who should be held criminally responsible.

Trafficking in human organs is indeed a cruel harvest of the poor.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ali Ehsassi]

Thank you, Senator.

We now go to MP Genuis for five minutes, please.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, colleagues.

I want to salute Senator Ataullahjan's incredible work on this bill. She has explained very well the provisions of the bill and I won't repeat them. I wanted to speak more to the process and timing around this bill's life over the last 15 years.

This concept was originally proposed by a Liberal MP, Borys Wrzesnewskyj, and a similar bill was tabled by Irwin Cotler. Neither of those bills was able to be brought for a vote. The process started in 2008, so it was almost 15 years ago.

Senator Ataullahjan and I began working on this bill shortly after 2015. We were able to see a previous bill on organ harvesting and trafficking, Bill S-240, pass the Senate, come to the House, and come before the foreign affairs committee. It was amended by the foreign affairs committee, adopted, and sent back to the Senate, but unfortunately, before the Senate could consider the revised version, we went into an election.

Efforts have continued since. Exactly the same bill, in the same way it had been amended by the House of Commons foreign affairs committee, was proposed and adopted by the Senate in the last Parliament, and again it didn't make it through the process.

This bill has now been adopted three times by the Senate, and twice in its present form. It's been adopted previously by the House of Commons in its present form, and this form is exactly as it was amended by this committee in that Parliament. At the time, I was here at the committee, as was Borys Wrzesnewskyj, who was the originator of this concept as legislation.

I'm normally the first person to say a bill should be studied in detail. The fact is that this bill has been studied extensively for 15 years. It's back before this committee in exactly the same form, and frankly, it's a no-brainer from a human rights perspective.

We had good cross-party co-operation to get it up to this committee. The bill collapsed after only one hour of debate at second reading, and I was very grateful to see that. Unfortunately, we are now only taking this bill up close to six months after it was referred to the committee.

My view is that it is valuable for committees to prioritize legislation, because although there's a range of important issues before any committee, legislation is where committees exercise their hard power. They can send recommendations as part of studies, but when it comes to legislation, that's where they exercise their hard law-making power. We would all accept that if it was a government bill, there would be an expectation to prioritize it.

I very much wish we could have moved this bill forward earlier. Nonetheless, we are where we are. As this bill is currently scheduled, we would go to clause-by-clause consideration of it next Wednesday. That is the last possible point before it would be automatically reported to the House anyway. At this point, frankly, it is better for this bill if it is not considered clause by clause and instead simply automatically reported.

If it is considered clause by clause and then reported to the House, then it has to go through report stage and third reading, whereas if we wait and simply allow it to be automatically reported on November 28, then it goes straight to third reading and is able to move more quickly.

I also think it would be very unfortunate if we had amendments adopted to this bill, because it goes back through the Senate. I don't want to have to wait another 15 years to pass a no-brainer piece of human rights legislation. This is the version as it was amended by the committee, with amendments initiated by the government at the time.

I really hope we're able to get to that point of it being automatically reported. If we were undertaking a study of this bill months ago, then there would be time to do clause-by-clause study and maybe even time for amendments, but there just isn't time at this point. I'm very hopeful that rather than seeing further delays, we will recognize the work that has already been done on this bill. We'll recognize the fact that this bill is in the form it was amended to by the government the last time it was before the House, the many times that it has passed the House and the Senate, and that every time it's been up for a vote, the vote was unanimous.

I'm hopeful that we would simply absorb and recognize the work that's been done and allow this bill to be automatically reported to the House so it can go to third reading and proceed to finally, after 15 years, become law.

I think that's the least we owe to the many victims of this horrific practice around the world.

Thank you, Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ali Ehsassi]

Thank you, MP Genuis. Your timing was perfect. It was exactly five minutes.

Now we will open it to questions by the members.

Mr. Hoback, you are first, and you'll be happy to know you have six minutes.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

I have six minutes, Chair. Does that mean I get seven minutes or nine minutes, because I'm—

[The Chair, Liberal, Ali Ehsassi]

No. It's six minutes.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Are you sure it's not six or nine minutes? I am eating up my time.

I would like to welcome Mr. McKay here, too. It's great to see you here.

Mr. McKay has a lot of my respect. I know his work in the U.S. has been very honourable. I look forward to working with him down in the U.S. going forward, for sure, because he does great work.

Senator, I have one question. As Mr. Genuis has said, we've studied this bill. It's been in front of us on numerous occasions. You know this file inside out, and I think everybody in this room would recognize your strength on these types of issues.

Is there anything you see in this piece of legislation that should be added, amended or changed, or is it good enough the way it is? What should be the priority?

[Senator Salma Ataullahjan, Senator]

Thank you for that question.

This is the bill that was sent to us, which this committee and the House approved. I've tabled it, I think, four times, and I tabled it the first day we were back. We didn't even take it back to committee, because we had already looked at it in the committee and the senators on every side were all satisfied. There was unanimous consent that this is a good bill and we needed to pass it.

We accepted the changes you made, so basically this is what you sent us and we have brought it back to you. We accepted your changes. I can't think of anything we could add to it.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

I thank you and the Senate for doing the work you've done.

As Mr. Genuis has said, this has been talked about and talked about. It's time to move forward, so I don't know if there is any value in talking about this issue anymore. As Mr. Genuis has said, let's get it out of the committee, get it voted on and get it into legislation. I think that's the goal here.

In light of that, Chair, our committee has quite a few things that aren't finished. It seems like we have different reports. We have some motions that haven't been read, so I suggest that we continue.

What I would suggest is that the debate be resumed on the motion that Garnett Genuis moved on Monday, November 14, and that a vote on the motion take place by the end of this meeting. Let's try to finish that debate and get it done today, and then we can continue checking that box and getting things done before Christmas.

I move that we move to that work.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ali Ehsassi]

Mr. Hoback, surely you recognize that the particular issue is not relevant to the issue that is before us today, and this was agreed well in advance.

Is it...?

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

I have the motion, so I think it's something.... I don't see anybody objecting to that. I think they are all very comfortable with what we've seen already as far as the witnesses and their testimony are concerned.

[Rob Oliphant, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

I have a point of order.

We haven't had any chance to debate this bill. This is not the same foreign affairs committee. This is a new committee in a new Parliament, and we absolutely have the responsibility to ask the witnesses who have come here for both this panel and the next panel—perhaps also future panels—questions about this bill.

We are not the same Parliament. We are not the Senate. We are the House of Commons and we're a different Parliament. We've been elected with a different mandate from the previous Parliament, so I would strenuously object to saying that we fast-track anything on the basis that something was done somewhere else.

It could have been done in another country for all that matters. We are in this Parliament, at this time, in this place, with this committee and with a new membership. I have never been on a committee in this House that has debated this bill. It is my first time, so I would like the opportunity to get into it, as I think many members of the committee would.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ali Ehsassi]

Mr. Angus, you are next, sir.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

It's our duty as lawmakers to study the laws that are being implemented. I appreciate that the member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan is eager about this. [Technical difficulty—Editor] tell me that it's a great bill. Other people have looked at it and just passed it.

I'm talking about a very serious issue, so either this issue is a serious issue or it's inconsequential. If it's inconsequential, then sure, let's debate whatever the Conservatives want to talk about. If it is as serious as we've been told, then questions need to be asked about this bill, about how it's going to be implemented, about who it's going to impact and whether or not it will do the job we've been told it's going to do.

I have no reason to believe, right now, that we can simply rubber-stamp something based on something that another Parliament did at another time with other people. I am here to represent the people of my region and my party, and to make sure that I do the work as a parliamentarian that people expect of me, because we're talking about changing laws.

I would strenuously oppose shutting down debate on this bill. We need to finish this. If the member takes this bill seriously, he would obviously want us to look at this.

I take it seriously. I've taken the time to be here and I am ready to ask questions, so I would say we should continue.

[Rob Oliphant, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

On a point of order, I wasn't debating the motion, because I wasn't sure it was a motion. I wasn't quite sure of what the member said. If it was a motion, I think it was dilatory and I think it's not debatable, but I don't know whether he was making a suggestion or a motion.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

I was making a motion.

[Rob Oliphant, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

You were making a motion.

I think it's not debatable, but I would need the chair's—

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

There's a condition in it.

[Rob Oliphant, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

There's a condition in it.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Yes.

[Rob Oliphant, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

Could I have it reread, then?

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Sure: That the debate be resumed on the motion Garnett Genuis moved on Monday, November 14, and that a vote on the motion take place by the end of this meeting.

Again, the goal is to try to finish this. I want to make sure that people understand that we're not shortchanging any of the work that the senator has done or that the Senate has done or that the House has done before them—and Parliaments before them. There has been a lot of work done on this file. I think there's an expectation, though, by Canadians that we actually move on and actually get this file onto the legislative agenda and back into the House.

There are items that are crucial. The Gazprom issue is a crucial issue at this point in time. We've been talking about it for a while. We need to have a message sent to the Ukrainians that we're there to support them. Why wouldn't we take advantage of the time today?

I think we're all in agreement in regard to the senator and her comments and the legislation moving forward, so why wouldn't we just get to work on doing some stuff that we know also has to be done? Why don't we try to complete some things for a change, instead of leaving things hanging in the air?

[The Chair, Liberal, Ali Ehsassi]

Thank you.

We go next to Mr. Epp.

[Dave Epp, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Leamington, ON]

Mr. Chair, my understanding of process is that we do have a motion on the floor on Gazprom. If we're talking about anything, with all due respect to the motion or the bill that's been studied and studied and studied, should our discussion not revolve around the importance of the Gazprom motion? That's what's on the floor.