Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have an opportunity to participate in the debate about property rights which has been initiated by the hon. member for Yorkton--Melville.
This is not the first time I have had the opportunity to hear a debate in the House about property rights. My mind harkens back to the debate about whether or not property rights should be included in the charter of rights and freedoms at the time when the House was seized with the question of the charter of rights and freedoms.
It is ironic that the debate originates with an Alliance member, although I understand it is a private member's bill and he is entitled to his own views on this. The Alliance Party has always demonstrated a great respect for provincial jurisdiction and for the views of the provinces.
I simply remind the hon. member, as I have in another forum, that when property rights was suggested as something to be included in the charter of rights and freedoms in the debate in this place and across the country between 1980 and 1981, when the patriation package was finalized, it was the provinces that objected very strongly to including property rights in the charter of rights and freedoms because they saw that as a matter of provincial jurisdiction.
One can hold that view and still not be in disagreement with article 17 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which says:
Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property...
I suppose even the United Nations declarations need to be updated. Probably this should read his or her property. We will forgo the gender based analysis of United Nations declarations at the moment and say that really the debate here is about in some respects whether or not this should be included in the charter of rights and freedoms.
I might also say that at the time the NDP was opposed to the inclusion of property rights in the charter of rights and freedoms. We did not see it as an appropriate right to be included in the charter at that time, regardless of questions of jurisdiction.
Since then, it seems to me that the rights of property have hardly suffered. Since 1981 the rights of property, in spite of the fact that they are not included in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, have done nothing but advance in ways that, frankly, I find regrettable and questionable.
I am thinking of the way intellectual property rights have advanced to such a degree that Canada had to abandon its generic drug laws on the basis of agreements entered into between Canada and the United States and ultimately at the global level with respect to the intellectual property rights of brand name drug creators and producers.
This is an occasion where property rights trump all kinds of human needs. They trump the needs of the health care system, and we all know it is that property right and the consequences of having it enshrined in the way that it was that is one of the cost drivers of our health care system. It is one of the reasons we are having the debate about the future of medicare today. It is because of the private property rights that were enshrined in the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, sometimes called TRIPS.
I would think it would have been more appropriate for members of parliament not to be concerned about the alleged erosion of property rights by virtue of the absence of property rights in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms but to be more concerned, indeed alarmed, about the way property rights are being enshrined everywhere. They may not be enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms but they are certainly enshrined at the World Trade Organization and in the NAFTA where the property rights of corporations trump the environment, labour standards and almost anything we can think of. Are property rights under attack? They are hardly under attack.
Thinking about the advancement of property rights, we now face the possibility of our very genetic material being regarded as corporate property. I remember one of the first debates in the House I was ever in. The hon. member opposite was probably involved in the National Farmers Union at the time and talking like a New Democrat. When plant breeders' rights were an issue in the late seventies and had not yet been instituted by the House of Commons I took part in a debate in the fall of 1979 in which the NDP expressed concern about the institution of plant breeders' rights and the consequences it would have for our agricultural system and for various forms of vertical integration and corporate control.
We lost that debate and have lost a few others since then. Most of them had to do with property and the role property rights have had in determining the kind of agricultural policies we would have, the kind of health care policies we would have and a myriad of other policy sectors that have been affected not by the erosion of property rights but by the ever accelerating entrenchment and expansion of property rights.
As I mentioned before I got off on the plant breeders' rights tangent, I am now concerned that the human genome or our very DNA and genetic material will become the object of the same property rights fixation so that we will be buying and selling gene therapies in the marketplace and our health care system will be affected once again.
None other than Premier Mike Harris, who is not exactly known for his left wing views, has expressed concern about the cost this might pose for the health care system and the fact that these things are being patented and held in abeyance by various corporations. The Canadian health care system will be put in the position, if it has not already in certain circumstances, of having to pay enormous sums of money to have these gene therapies available.
I frankly think this is wrong. If we want to talk about an axis of evil this is where we find real evidence of wrong, in the way corporations want to own the very structures of our biological existence and piece them out to us on a cost-plus, profit basis.
If the hon. member from the Alliance is worried about property rights he should be able to sleep soundly tonight. I can tell hon. members that property rights are not exactly under threat anywhere. Quite the contrary, it is the human race and the global environment that are under attack by a far too strong entrenchment of property rights in the various ways that I have had this brief opportunity to describe.