Madam Speaker, earlier this afternoon a colleague in a private conversation reminded us that this is to be a deliberative process. It is somewhat difficult, and it has been alluded to by other members already, when we have amendments thrown in at the midnight hour so to speak. They are embargoed actually until this morning, then on the floor, and we are talking on them right away.
I am not sure if this requires a change in the House orders some day down the road so that with a little adjustment we can all be aware well in advance of all these changes that go on in the course of a day and do not catch us by surprise.
The mandate of the agency in clause 21 of the bill would be to promote the human dignity and human rights of Canadians, yet this does not seem to be reflected in the preamble of the bill. The contradiction can be resolved by including the following statement in the preamble. It is taken almost word for word from the majority report of the health committee which stated:
It is hereby recognized and declared that assisted human reproduction and related research must be governed by principles and practices that respect human individuality, dignity, and integrity;
By putting that in as an outset statement would go a long way to making clear the intent of the bill.
The assisted human reproduction agency of Canada, as things stand in the bill unless it has been changed, would not be reporting to Parliament, but only to the minister. That causes concern for many of us here and members across the way have even alluded to that. We believe as a party and as individuals that it should be made an independent agency, so that we have accurate reporting to the Parliament of Canada representing the people of the nation.
Clause 25 would allow the minister to give any policy direction she likes to the agency. The agency must follow it without question. It must do the minister's bidding. The clause would ensure that in fact that direction or instruction that she gives the agency should remain secret and that it remain privy information.
The Canadian Alliance says that if it were an independent agency answerable to Parliament, a report being tabled annually to Parliament, that such political direction without the proper scrutiny would be more difficult to do. We say that the clause should be eliminated entirely.
We also notice here and others have made mention of this that members of the board should have fixed twice renewable terms of three years to ensure that the minister could not simply get rid of a non-compliant board member or, on the other hand, keep a compliant board member there forever. That was a recommendation of the majority health committee report.
We believe this could be fixed up and improved by appointing the chair of the agency for a five year term, rather than a three year period. The span of that person's chairmanship would then surpass the electoral cycle. That would minimize some of the political pressure that such a person would be in and the pressure on the agency as well.
The performance of the agency should be evaluated by the Auditor General, that august person in our democracy, rather than the agency itself. That review should be made public. Our Auditor General performs a stellar task for our country by way of shaming or commanding the government in terms of programs that it is responsible for. The Auditor General could play an important role in respect to the evaluation and the performance of this particular agency which has some major life and death issues that it deals with. The review could be made public on an annual basis.
There has been some talk by members about the licensing process. We do not want one member of this body having all the rights to determine who will have these licences. It should be a transparent and a public process. We could improve the bill by way of an insertion of that particular aspect.
The bill allows for the creation of advisory panels. We believe the bill should mandate that they include key stakeholders. Obviously it makes a lot of sense. The users of assisted human reproductive technology should be part of that. Children who are born with AHR technologies, people with disabilities, people from the medical community, and people from the faith communities could provide good ethics and good input on the whole thing.
The board should include professional ethicists and representatives of research ethics boards, private sector providers of services and private research firms, taxpayers and their representatives namely provincial and territorial governments.
That list is completely in accord with the majority and minority reports of the Standing Committee on Health.
I will now turn to the records that would be kept by this particular agency. We must keep a constant watch and monitor the agency which is moving in some new and unchartered territory. Records are crucial in terms of monitoring what happens. As it is, there are no proper reporting requirements and no reporting requirements in the bill at all. At the very least we have talked about an annual report that must be mandated to come to Parliament.
That report must summarize the activities of the agency and must include the statistics on the numbers of individual donors, the types of donations, the embryos created and destroyed, persons who undergo assisted reproduction procedures and persons conceived as a result, as well as any research projects undertaken using human embryos.
We have a suggestion that a new clause should be inserted which would specify that all embryos produced and destroyed by licensees be maintained in the registry of the agency and be identified by name rather than some vague, cloaked number but rather by name using a standard formulae, a combination of both donors names.
We believe that would accord some value, respect and dignity to the human embryo and would help to ensure that thousands of anonymous embryos are not routinely created and destroyed. That is the concern of many members of all parties in the House. It is a matter of respect and sanctity of life. We must be cautious and careful.
My remarks are hopefully instructive and may be something that members across the way on the government side in particular would take to heart as well as the minister of this particular department with respect to the structure of the agency, and also with respect to the crucial records that would be kept, such that we monitor and see what is developing with this new and important agency that is being created.