Mr. Speaker, I will begin by commending my colleague for introducing this bill. It is a very good bill. One of the things that has really impressed me in my years as a member of parliament is that many of the good ideas that come into the Chamber are brought in by private members. These are the people, all of us, who on the weekends and in the weeks out of the House rub shoulders with our constituents. We find out from them what is really important to them. To me that is the essence of representative democracy: to bring to the Chamber the ideas that our electors back home implore us to deal with.
I am very pleased that my colleague has introduced the bill. I am also exceptionally pleased that in our grand lottery scheme he actually had his bill drawn and was then able to somehow persuade that so-called independent committee that it was actually worthy of a debate longer than one hour and worthy of a vote. We will actually be voting on this.
That is truly remarkable and it should not be. If I digress for just a few seconds, Mr. Speaker, I am sure you will not mind. There should not be occasions when members bring forward ideas that they consider important enough to occupy the House's time which are then automatically discarded without resulting in a decision, by vote, of the members here.
Quite a bit has already been said about this bill and why people should support it. If I may, I would like to add my ideas and my argument in favour of supporting the bill.
There are a number of important issues. The one I would underline is the conflict that appears when we have presumed conflicting rights. We have these all the time, no matter how large the society.
Our children are all grown up and have left home, so our little society in our house consists of my wife and myself. Every once in a while we have little conflicts on whether she should get her way or I should get mine if we disagree on something. I have learned over the years to simply compromise and do what she wants, not always but most of the time. It keeps peace in the house. I know if she gets word of what I have said here, I will be in trouble when I get home, but we will debate that further at that stage.
This situation arises in a democracy, in a society, regardless of whether there are two people or 30 million. There will be times when the rights of people collide. How do we evaluate which right takes precedence over the other?
The issue before us today is one of those cases where one does not have to be a very deep-thinking person to realize that it is almost an open and shut case. I know that we want to defend the right of privacy in the country, and justifiably so. We do not want a society where people are looking over our shoulders and watching everything we say, do and think.
Notwithstanding that, we seem to have that situation in the country. We have agencies of the government like the CRTC, for example, which is very involved in determining even which radio stations can exist, what their formats will be and what they can broadcast. That to me is an intrusion on a personal freedom. If people have financial backing and want to have a radio station on a certain theme, they should have the right to proceed. It should not be up to a government bureaucracy to decide that they cannot.
However we have situations like the one before us today where one person, having done the right things, is potentially at risk of contracting a life threatening disease, whereas the other person has the risk of giving a sample of blood or other body tissue that he or she does not want to give so that an evaluation can be made as to whether or not the person who is the victim has been infected.
It seems to me that this is not an issue we have to think very hard about. The rights being protected are worlds apart in magnitude. One is very important and the other one, the necessity of giving a sample of blood or whatever, is a very small loss.
When I was younger I used to donate blood at the Red Cross clinics. It was not very painful to give. In those days we measured things in quarts and gallons. I would go quite regularly and give a quart of blood with no problem.
How can a person say that my rights are being violated if I am asked to give a little vial of blood so that another person can find out whether or not he or she has been infected? To me it is totally clear.
I am going to run out of time very shortly, but I would like to appeal to all members of the House to simply use their intelligence, analytic abilities and independence to vote in favour of this very good bill.