Madam Speaker, as you know, this matter does not fall under my minister's portfolio but it is one in which I have played an active role in by informing myself about Bill C-13 and some of its important provisions.
The member who has just spoken has moved a motion in the House that would call on the Standing Committee on Health, which is presently studying Bill C-13, an act on reproductive technologies, assisted human reproduction, to have the bill split in two so that it can deal with matters related to the criminalization of practices such as cloning and have that handled in a separate bill.
I believe that the motion is relevant. This is a very, very complex bill. It is a bill that in fact has its genesis in a royal commission from at least 10 years ago. The response of the public to it, certainly with regard to certain aspects, for instance cloning, I think was fairly definitive, but the science was evolving with a rapidity that the public was not able to really be fully aware of.
There was an attempt in 1997, I believe, to have a bill that responded to the royal commission. It did not get through the legislative process before the subsequent election. It was not until this Parliament that a legislative effort actually came forward.
It is interesting that after a number of years of having a royal commission, of certainly many people having advocacy positions with regard to reproductive technologies, both with regard to prohibitions and support for other aspects of reproductive technologies, the then minister of health came forward with a draft bill. That draft bill went through second reading here and to committee, where over 100 witnesses were heard on a variety of aspects. That is very significant. Hearing 100 or more witnesses on a bill indicates that it is not an insignificant bill.
I have to credit the committee with having prepared one of the most comprehensive, thoughtful and constructive reports of a standing committee, and on a very tough bill. That report was tabled in the House in December 2001. The response of the then minister of health was to not address specifically the 34 recommendations of this report on the draft legislation. In fact, on the last day on which it was possible for the minister to respond, the minister, and I believe it was on May 9 of this year, tabled Bill C-56 in response to the draft report.
There have been changes made between the draft bill and this one. One of the things I noticed was that in many of the clauses there was this standard phrase, for instance, “this is prohibited”, and then “unless otherwise provided for in the regulations”. If we were to look at this bill we would find that reference to the regulations spread throughout the entire bill, to the extent that I am not entirely comfortable that I know what the bill stands for in all regards and what I would be voting on if I were to vote for the bill, because I will not see the regulations until after the bill is passed and receives royal assent. This is backwards. I would like to see the regulations before the bill is passed.
I believe the relevance here is that the member has raised an issue with regard to jurisdiction. It is an issue, particularly with regard to criminalization related to the prohibitions. It is a relevant question and has been argued by others back at the beginning of the debate on Bill C-56, which transformed itself into Bill C-13 after prorogation.
There were calls for the bill to be split between the reproductive technologies part, i.e. cloning, genetic alterations, surrogacy issues, et cetera, and another part which dealt with issues, such as the restrictive use of stem cells from embryos for research purposes, a very difficult issue for many Canadians because of the ethical implications.
This particular bill, as the mover of the motion laid out, includes provisions whereby if provinces have existing legislation and regulations in place that address elements of the proposed bill, Bill C-13, that with consultations and negotiations the provincial legislation or regulations would be the relevant or the operative jurisdiction on those matters where there was an agreement. Therefore there are these kinds of provisions in there.
It is a rare case where federal jurisdiction and federal law would be seconded to a province. At any point in time we can imagine what would happen if there was a case before the courts and somebody asked what the federal law said on it. The federal would say “This you cannot do, blah, blah, blah”. However it is subject to whether or not there is an equivalency agreement. The fine line of the law being what it is, the interpretation of whether or not there was an offence, criminal or otherwise, could be very fine. Therefore a significant effort would have to be made to ensure that should there in fact be any equivalency agreements, that those clearly reflect the legislative intent of the federal legislation.
The member who moved the motion did not mention it specifically but I thought it was interesting to note that the Quebec minister of, I believe, health and social services announced very quickly after the bill was tabled in the House that the province of Quebec would be banning the utilization of embryos for harvesting stem cells; in fact banning embryonic stem cell research outright. The words he used were “It is forbidden”. I remember reading that in the press article.
While all this is going on, we have a group called the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. It came forward with an interesting set of guidelines. It is the funding agency for publicly funded research in Canada, including things on embryonic stem cell research, and it has laid out the guidelines and the criteria under which they would permit such research.
That was quite controversial to this place and certainly to the health committee because those guidelines were developed and it was announced that they would be in place almost immediately at the same time as the committee was in the middle of dealing with Bill C-56, the legislation on precisely that issue. The controversy was that we now had another jurisdiction.
This agency was set up by the Government of Canada. It transferred funds to publicly funded research projects. I believe it was formerly called the Medical Research Council and is now called the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. It even brings more relevance to the question of whether or not there is a jurisdictional problem here, because it is not just the federal government and provincial governments, it is also funding agencies, et cetera. Our bill right now, I believe, but I do not have my papers with me, seems to take the approach that this is the law but if the law is silent on some aspect then that other aspect still comes into play. I am thinking of the tri-council policy statement that permits research on embryos up to 14 days. We know that is in there.
What I do not believe is fully covered in the bill is the element of education and training and whether or not all of the provisions with regard to the safeguards, controls, consent, et cetera, with regard to donations of gametes or embryos for education and research purposes, are fully articulated in the current bill. I think we may want to consider whether there has to be some amendments. That is another jurisdiction.
The tri-council policy is basically the recognized leader or association of all researchers that makes pronouncements and provides guidelines for all research.
We have the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the tri-council policy statement and the provinces all having the opportunity to establish equivalency agreements and negotiate those with the governments, and then we maybe have another dimension that enters into this and that is the disciplines.
The Canadian Bar Association, which appeared before the health committee yesterday, said that it had a problem with criminalizing prohibitive behaviour. If a person makes a clone that is prohibited by this law should the person be treated as a criminal and penalized as a criminal? Bill C-13 says, yes. The Canadian Bar Association says, no. Other representatives of the medical research community obviously have come to us and said, no.
Now we have, not necessarily a formal jurisdiction, but certainly an industry, that being the lawyers, doctors, researchers and whoever else, having a problem with jurisdiction. I do not know how they will fight their cases if every province will be able to establish their own rules and require respect for their laws, practices and regulations, which will be incorporated, I guess by reference, in this legislation.
Now we are getting complicated. This now is a multidimensional problem. The member therefore has raised a quite straightforward motion, the implications of which are enormous. They are enormous because if we open up this matter with regard to the criminalization issue we must necessarily open up the matter with regard to splitting the bill between reproductive technologies and related research.
Eighty-five per cent of the bill is acceptable to Canadians and to the House. There was such a strong consensus on the bill, which deals with cloning, genetic alteration, surrogacy for profit, et cetera, all in line with what the health committee report on the draft legislation laid out, that today the legislation would have been passed.
However, it is not passed today and there is one reason and one reason only, and that is because the bill incorporated the whole aspect of related research.
I understand that research using embryos is an activity and that those embryos have to come from somewhere. Where they come from and prescribed to come from under the act is embryos which are surplus or left over after the process of in vitro fertilization, test tube babies.
The only linkage to this bill is the fact that those embryos are surplus to an IVF process. The IVF process is part of the reproductive technologies bill. It is a very small linkage. This whole area of embryo related research, education and training, finding therapies and cures for Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, multiple sclerosis, cancer and diabetes, is a wonderful science. I know of no one in Canada who is opposed to stem cell research because stem cells occur naturally in the human body. Every organ in the human body has stem cells. They also occur in placentas, umbilical cords, umbilical cord blood, aborted fetuses, as well as in embryos. The only linkage of related research in Bill C-13 is the fact that embryos from the IVF process will be used in the research, and the IVF process is linked to reproductive technologies.
A perfect argument would be to say that we should split the bill and take the reproductive technologies as one bill. Eighty-five per cent of the substance of this bill is acceptable to Canadians and to the House, party by party. It could be passed immediately and put into law. We could then ban cloning and genetic alteration in Canada. We would be able to deal with surrogacy for profit in Canada. We could have done this a year ago but the bill included related research. Now we have a problem.
If we look at the volume of the bill, we see that only about 50% of the pages are on reproductive technologies. The rest of the bill sets up an agency. We are going to set up an agency with a full time chair and representatives from all disciplines and provinces, part time people, and their responsibility will be to license fertility clinics and researchers. We are going to set up a bureaucracy.
On top of that, and I will not talk about it in any detail but I will just raise it, when we deal with research we are dealing with commercialization issues, and money gets made. Things like generic drugs versus brand names, the patent process and the legal issues of informed consent really start to come in on the related research.
When we look at this, the provisions to establish this agency are enormous. After the bill gets royal assent, which I expect might be in a year from now, it will take an additional two years to establish this agency and the related regulations. We are two and a half years away from having laws on the books to ban cloning. Shame.
I would argue, just as did the member who moved this motion, that we should split this bill and get the related technologies out of it. If it is going to take that long to come up with regulations to figure out how to deal with this, why not spend the time to look at this carefully, but let us get legislation on the books banning cloning, banning genetic alteration, and dealing with surrogacy for profit. Let us get those other prohibitions on there and the other controlled activities. It has nothing to do with embryonic stem cells. It has to do with the fact that Canada does not today have any legislation whatsoever dealing with matters such as cloning. We are one of the 128 countries in the world that does not even have legislation on these important matters.
We could have that legislation immediately. All it would take is to split the bill. I could make that argument just as well as the hon. member from the Bloc who moved this motion to split it. With regard to jurisdictional issues it is tremendously complex.
It has taken a long time to deal with the bill. I suspect it will take a lot longer. I know that members are very concerned about this issue. Certainly there are ethical issues that are involved which are not universal.
Canadians must be heard. We must respect the due process of the legislative process. If it means that we have to have a vacuum in our legislation on matters such as cloning, because we have put things in there which perhaps should not have been there to make an efficient disposition of legislation, there is always time for common sense to prevail.