Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to join the debate on the bill dealing with human reproductive technologies.
I will not be supporting the bill as it is now constituted. I must express my appreciation to our leader and our caucus for allowing our members to freely express their thoughts and feelings on this whole issue instead of invoking party discipline and squashing the debate. There are some important issues around the bill that people feel strongly about for a number of different reasons.
I would hope the Prime Minister and members of the government side would allow the same kind of freedom of expression and freedom to vote to their members when the bill comes to a vote. That is the democratic process and we would be better able to express the wills of our constituents and our own feelings on the issue. However, I am not terribly optimistic that will happen based upon what has happened to the bill up to this point. I am delighted to see that the government is at least making some attempt to introduce some legislation and regulations on the issue of human reproductive technology. It is long overdue.
I accept and believe the rumours we hear so often about a number of women around the world today carrying cloned embryos. At some point those cloned embryos will be brought forth as living human beings. What the result of that experiment will be anybody can guess. We are already a little late in bringing forth this legislation, but better late than never.
The primary reason that I will not support the legislation as it stands regards one of my favourite hobby horses about this place and how it works. This issue has been discussed endlessly by a royal commission which brought forth recommendations. The same issues have been before a committee for months. The committee has the ability to, and in fact did, bring forth experts on the issue from a number of places in the world to provide expert advice to help it put together a report.
As has happened so many other times, and most recently the bill on endangered species is a good example, in spite of all the time, effort and expert opinion which was presented, the bill before the House is not the result of what the committee heard. It was produced by some nameless, faceless bureaucrat somewhere and does not reflect what the experts told the committee in numerous different areas. There are some things in the bill that do reflect what the committee heard, but in so many areas, with no apparent explanation, the opinions of both the minority and majority committee reports were rejected by these bureaucrats who drafted the bill.
That is so objectionable and undemocratic. If these bills were drafted by an all party committee on the basis of the advice of the experts it subpoenaed we would have much better legislation and it would actually be a democratic process.
I am disappointed that it is not. I will continue to present that opinion on any number of issues that come before the House in the hope that somewhere in eternity the rules of the House and the protocol that governs the production of legislation will change to make it possible.
I want to talk about the whole issue of stem cell research without getting too far into the controversy. It is the most controversial part of the bill. I do not come to this part of the discussion from a religious or moral position. I prefer to approach it from an position of logic so that after all is said and done I can explain to my constituents how I voted and why. I want to vote in a way that is logical because there does not seem to be a lot of logic around the issue.
Last night the hon. member for Yorkton--Melville introduced a private member's bill for discussion in the House concerning the redefinition of human life in the criminal code. There was an instant and outrageous reaction from members of the House about the possibility of even raising the discussion. However I do not see how the government could allow embryonic stem cell research under Bill C-56 without somehow addressing the fundamental issue behind it: When does life begin and when does it deserve the protection of the law? That is not addressed at all in the bill. Yet it would allow embryonic stem cell research.
I will never understand that. It happens with the government with respect to so many issues we deal with in this place. I sat for a time on the committee that judges when private members' bills should be made votable and when they should not. It amazed me that when a particularly contentious or controversial subject came before the committee the other committee members said we could not make it votable because it was too controversial. I am always surprised when we shy away from controversial issues. I thought that was what we were sent here for: to debate controversial issues on behalf of Canadians and make laws out of the debates.
It surprises me that we would avoid the issue of when life begins and when it deserves protection. If we are to avoid this controversial issue, and that is a choice the government can make, it follows that we should ban research on embryonic stem cells because we do not want to go down the controversial road of defining when life begins and when it should be protected.
There have been extremely promising recent breakthroughs in the area of adult stem cell research, an area which is progressing faster than embryonic stem cell research. We could disallow embryonic stem cell research and instead focus our funding and attention on adult stem cell research. This would avoid the controversy of debating when life begins, the ethics of abortion and other issues.
My time is running out. I will make one other point on which I will have more time to elaborate as we go forward. The makeup of the board that would direct the legislation is seriously flawed, like so many of the boards the government brings forward. It would give the minister all power to make changes without being accountable to parliament. We need to seriously change the structure of the board to make it accountable to parliament so that the changes that are made as we go forward in the review three years from now come back to parliament and parliament's voice is heard through debate again. We will talk more about that later.