Mr. Speaker, the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey starts with a scene of a bunch of prehumans, ape-like creatures, gathered around doing the various things they do. One of them, in a random act, grabs the femur of some animal, waves it around and eventually smashes another bone with it. He waves it more and smashes more and the next day in an attack uses it to club down somebody. The metaphor was the birth of the age of technology. What it did not show was that night around the campfire when those same groups were talking about what had happened and one of them said that if the creator had wanted us to have bones to hit people with he would have grown them out of the ends of our arms.
Thus in a sense the debate we are engaged in here was born. Throughout history there has been a constant debate between the capacity that science gives us and the ability of a society to absorb that capacity, to understand it, to come to terms with it and to figure out how it fits into the kind of life we want to lead.
I actually was not going to speak to the bill, but upon reflection and after listening to some of the debate today I thought it would be useful to reflect a bit on what occurred in the committee as we did the pre-study of the bill, because it was a really marvellous opportunity. It was a marvellous time.
In all the years I have been here I have not had a committee process that brought together into a struggle so many people from so many different positions. That is all I can say about it. People fought. They wrestled openly with the concerns they had. Those concerns got debated. We tried to figure out the tremendous promise that was inherent in the advancement of science in this area and the very real fears about what this does to us as a society. What happens if we start to truly treat life as a commodity that can be bought and sold or if we manufacture life for other purposes? These are the kinds of issues where I think this place is at its best when it truly struggles with them. I think the report that was produced was the best we were able to do to try to marry those conflicts.
I wrote a piece some years ago on how parliament could never make an optimal decision because what is optimal is in many ways dependent on one's point of view. We all come to the table with a particular position on something. Ultimately, throughout all of these processes, we pick the best fit, the best marriage of all the pressures, the concerns, the history and the diversity that exists in this country to make a decision that ultimately is not optimal from anybody's point of view but hopefully, in the best of times, is the most optimal decision for a society. I think we achieved that. I think we did something very special in that committee.
We also learned a lot. As someone who has worked with children for a good portion of my life, I learned a lot. I think it is important to step back to what got this started, which was the very real desire of people to have children. We heard images raised in some of the speeches about big farmers doing this and about a corporate agenda trying to achieve something else, but at the end of the day it was about people having difficulty conceiving, and they were searching desperately.
I was director of child welfare in Manitoba. I can tell hon. members about the numbers of people who are really trying very hard to have children, who want to have the kind of joy and satisfaction that I feel all the time with my kids. Science began to offer them some hope. It is not that long ago that the first in vitro fertilization took place. As well, we are also now doing a bill on the control of pesticides and there are actually concerns that some of the ways in which we burden our environment may contribute to the fact that people are having difficulty conceiving, to this rise in infertility. Also, the fact that people are waiting until later in life to have children is believed to be a big cause of it.
However, the reality was that a lot of very competent, caring Canadians were having trouble producing children. Some solutions were developed, not in a totally random way but by different people trying different things. Some doctors were more aggressive and we saw the rise of the clinics. A great deal of relatively unstructured activity took place at that time.
In a sense what rather surprised me was the randomness, because this was something that was driven by a couple wanting to have a child with all of the dialogue taking place between the couple and with the researcher and the doctor without any sort of social overview or any of the kinds of normal protections we might have in bringing forward a new medical service, to the point where, as we discovered in committee, there were children being produced who in some ways had none of the body of protections or supports and the family had none of the supports that we would offer to anybody adopting a child.
One of the very real issues was the ability to track parents. When I was first a director of child welfare in 1983, an adopted child could not track down his or her parents. Today open adoption is a commonly accepted practice and active adoption registries, where for certain reasons children can seek out their parents, are pretty much the norm. It is done for very real reasons. In this case, with the advancement of knowledge about genetics, knowing the genetic make-up of parents may be very helpful to people in the management of their own health.
Yet in regard to the issue we are dealing with today, we had a group of children being created and going into families but having none of those rights, those systems or that ability to track their parents. We found a sort of randomness in how the records were kept. Some were kept for a few years, but it was all at the discretion of the local physician.
There was a system that had grown. There were also concerns about the protection of the women, who were in effect the active guinea pigs for the advancement of this new technology and who were driven by their overwhelming desire to have children.
Then of course we had the concern that I would rate as the third order of business for the bill, which was the attempt to build a regulatory framework around the other services, the other activities that are enabled by the first ones, such as the availability of embryos so that research could actually be done on them. It was something that could not have been anticipated when all this started. We all see now the absolutely fantastic articles in the scientific journals and certainly in any tabloid. There was one article about combining spider genes with goats' milk in the hopes that the goats will produce a protein that produces spider silk, because of its wonderful strength. The idea of having goats spinning webs in my house does not thrill me, but it is hard for us to capture these things.
The ideas of combining the genes of animals and plants, as has been talked about with certain foods such as tomatoes, or combining genes of animals and humans to create other kinds of animals, now put very difficult, very frightening possibilities before us. Before now they did not exist and we did not have to worry about them because they could not happen, but today they are real.
On the other side of it, this research adds to our understanding of who and what we are and how we function in the hope that we can correct some of the very horrible conditions that afflict people. Hopefully we can correct some of the tremendous deformities and incapacities children are born with. Hopefully we can find the triggers to help quadriplegics regenerate nerves. There is a tremendous wealth of very exciting possibilities here.
Therefore, as society has had to do with each major advancement, we were called upon to try to figure out what was the optimal path for the group. I think we did a pretty good job.
I think we struck a balance in the committee report and what I see us doing now is a sort of drawing back and a re-fighting of the positions we fought through in that report. I think we need to reflect on what our collective goal was. There was not a surrender in the writing of that report. There was a consensus after a lot of struggle. We tried to strike a balance in regard to creating a commodity. We talked about fees, payment, for people who were acting as surrogates. The report recommended that there be no fee given. I argued that there should be, not that there should be a purchase price for a child, but if somebody's sister agrees to carry a child and take time off work to do so, that person should be able to compensate her. In the end it was decided to take a stronger line on that.
There were a number of issues like that. There were absolute bans and prohibitions on the cloning of human beings and on the creation of chimera, the mixture of animal and human genetic material. There was an absolute ban on it because we just could not imagine where that might go.
The debate about the benefit that may exist here, that sort of Holy Grail of being able to unlock some of these mysteries and actually make seriously injured people whole again, really led us to leave that door open, to leave a regulatory mechanism in there which would allow us to constantly make that decision because that decision needs to be made, remade and made again in the face of advancing knowledge. I think that was the right decision and the right approach to take and I think the bill captures the intention of the work we did. In some sections it does not use the same language. It does not go as far in some of the preambles as we would have gone, but I think it attempts to do that.
I also want to talk just briefly about what happened with CIHR, because when the Canadian Institutes of Health Research came out very quickly with its own guidelines I felt quite strongly that it was attempting to promote its position and to try to end run this process in advance of the House actually taking the time to act on this. I am here to say that I am very pleased with the actions of CIHR and its director since then. I think they have responded very appropriately by holding back. I really want to thank them for it and I congratulate them for being that sensitive to what has gone on.
There is another aspect to that. In attempting to deal with these very difficult and very sensitive subjects, we have tended to devalue expertise. It is easy to do that, to say that a researcher is just a clone of that particular drug company or that another researcher has some other motivation. The reality is that most of them are just researchers. They are just trying to figure out a new way of doing things. They are not driven by any other secret agenda or whatever. They are like all good researchers: they are in that quest for knowledge. We should listen to them. We should not disavow what they say. If we get ourselves to the point where we are driven only by emotion, then we are not respecting those who spend their time really trying to understand and bring some light to these topics. Then, I think, we do take ourselves back to the time of Galileo and forget to admit that the earth does revolve around the sun. There is a very real danger in this.
I think that where there is real discomfort is in that sense of commodification, that sense of making it really easy to have a child, almost to the point where one can pick the hair colour, the size and the intelligence quotient. There is that sense of almost being able to say that a certain kind of baby is wanted, but if it does not come out quite right we will toss out that one and get another one. I want to do everything we can to push back against that.
We know those forces exist. We see them in other countries with sex selection in children. We want to do everything we can to balance that, regulate it and push back against that trend. I argue educate on the other side of that because the only real change will come through broader education.
We have to be careful too that we do not shut the door on what could be some extremely important advancements in the health of ourselves, our children, our families and our nation.