Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise on debate at report stage of Bill C-13, an act regarding assisted human reproductive technologies and related research.
These amendments in Group No. 5 deal principally with the statutory framework for the agency created by the bill to provide licences to institutions or individuals, presumably scientists or scientific laboratories, who will be permitted to participate in in vitro fertilization as well as embryonic stem cell experimentation.
Most of the amendments under Group No. 5 seek to clarify the intent of Parliament to enhance protection for the parents of offspring by ensuring their consent for any scientific research, and also some of these amendments seek to strengthen the sanctions for licensees that violate the terms of the bill.
Let me go through these various amendments that I believe were all put forward in the name of the hon. member for Mississauga South, who has done yeoman's work in taking the legislative process very seriously with respect to the bill.
First I will turn to Motion No. 6, which seeks to amend the definition of consent. In the third clause of the bill, consent currently is defined as meaning:
...fully informed and freely given consent that is given in accordance with the applicable law governing consent.
The member's amendment states:
with the applicable law governing consent and that conforms to the provisions of the Human Pluripotent Stem Cell Research Guidelines released by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research in March, 2002, as detailed in the regulations.
Rather than simply leaving it to the new agency to create its own guidelines for consent, he is fixing it. The amendment proposes to fix in the bill an already extant proposal from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research on the question of donor consent.
Next, at Motion No. 80, the member for Mississauga South suggests that before a licence is granted to a scientist or a firm to engage in in vitro fertilization there be ethical guidelines and a peer review. Clause 40 states:
A licence authorizing the use of an in vitro embryo for the purpose of research may be issued only if the Agency is satisfied that the use is necessary for the purpose of the proposed research.
The amendment states:
...proposed research and the Agency has, in accordance with the regulations, received approval from a research ethics board and a peer review.
This seems sensible to me, to ensure that there are clear ethical considerations and a peer review, which is conventional of course for any scientific research, but it would be good if we were to make that a requirement in the bill, in my opinion.
Motion No. 81 would add to clause 40 of the bill a grandfather clause. It basically suggests that any embryos created prior to the coming into force of the bill, that is to say any embryos that are already perhaps frozen today, could only be treated in the future in accordance with the pre-existing CIHR guidelines. Essentially the member is saying that we will protect the existing embryos according to existing guidelines so that they do not end up in a kind of legal limbo, which could otherwise be the case.
Motion No. 82 seeks to amend clause 40 of the bill by saying that “a person who wishes to undertake research involving stem cells from in vitro embryos must provide the agency with the reasons why embryonic stem cells are to be used instead of stem cells from other sources”. This would place an obligation on the applicant for a licence to do this kind of research to demonstrate that embryonic stem cells are necessary and that the same results cannot be possibly achieved through non-embryonic stem cells.
I was not able to participate in the committee hearings, but anybody who has followed the matter will be very aware of the enormous new scientific potential posed by non-embryonic stem cells, be it stem cells harvested from umbilical cords of newly born babies or stem cells from infants or adults. I believe all these can offer far more significant scientific research possibilities than creating nascent human lives in the form of embryos in order to destroy, manipulate and research on them. Motion No. 82 would place that onus to demonstrate the necessity of using embryonic stem cells on the applicant for a licence.
Motion No. 83 says that the agency “shall not issue a licence under this section for embryonic stem cell research if there are an insufficient number of in vitro embryos available for that research”. This is a sensible motion.
No. 84 requires the written consent of the original gamete provider, that is to say the biological parent, before any scientific research can be done. This clarifies that the donor cannot become someone other than the biological parent. This is an important amendment which I will support.
No. 85 is a technical amendment which seeks to clarify the language.
I will turn to Motion No. 88 which is probably the most substance in this series. It says that the agency would insert the following under clause 40:
The Agency shall establish, for in vitro fertilizationprocedures, limits regarding, but not limited to, the following:
(a) the amount of all drug dosages that may be administered;
(b) the number of
(i) ova that may be harvested,
(ii) ova that may be fertilized,
(iii) in vitro embryos that may be implanted at any one time,and
(iv) embryos that may be cryogenically stored forreproductive purposes; and
(c) the length of time that an embryo may be stored.
These are critical issues and really central to the ethical consideration of our treatment of nascent human lives. Without this amendment, the bill would give virtual carte blanche to the agency to regulate these matters perhaps in a very lax fashion. We know from testimony and standard practice that in the whole field of in vitro fertilization an enormous number of nascent human lives are unnecessarily created because in a sense, as some might say in the vernacular sense, it is a numbers game. It is only a fairly small percentage of embryos created in vitro which will implant and come to term as children.
In some cases fertilization clinics are creating dozens of nascent human beings to have one successful baby come to full birth. This says that we would not allow these clinics to produce dozens, hundreds and cumulatively thousands of embryos which would end up being frozen and then end up being used for research purposes. This would close or at least limit a very large loophole which exists in the bill.
I look forward to speaking to other amendments as we continue consideration of the bill.