Mr. Speaker, I am not pleased to speak under the current circumstances. The government House leader has effectively brought closure on this matter of great importance.
The field which we are addressing in the bill is a dynamic field of science where the facts are changing on a weekly, if not daily basis. It is rare that we can open a newspaper without seeing some startling new scientific success and discovery with respect to the potential of adult and non-embryonic stem cells.
The science in the field of non-embryonic stem cells is increasing almost exponentially. We are now in a world of potential in terms of the research and application of non-embryonic stem cells. I would suggest that this is dramatically different in concrete terms than it was when the bill was first tabled by the Minister of Health.
In that time, in the ensuing two years since the original tabling of the bill, we have yet to see a single concrete application or useful research discovery with respect to embryonic stem cells, which is explicitly authorized in the bill.
That is why this matter deserves further consideration, not to delay for the sake of delaying. I recognize fully that there are aspects of Bill C-13 which are not controversial and have broad consensual support across the political and partisan spectrum in the House. There is also consensual support across the research and ethical spectrum of opinion for provisions in the bill that seek to ban human cloning and with respect to maternal surrogacy.
However, I believe, and I have heard members of the Liberal caucus argue in the House and members of all parties suggest, that there would be overwhelming consensus to pass a bill swiftly which would incorporate the non-controversial elements such as the ban on cloning which do not raise ethical concerns.
Following the review of the draft legislation tabled by the previous health minister, that is precisely why the majority of members from all parties on the Standing Committee on Health recommended that the bill be split between those elements, including the ban on cloning, which carry broad consensual support, and those elements, particularly the authorization of embryonic stem cell research, which raise grave ethical and moral questions.
It is regretable that the government ignored the advice of its own members on the Standing Committee on Health by refusing to split the bill between those aspects which were broadly supported and those aspects which remain highly controversial because of the ethical and moral concerns in respect of creating human life in order to destroy it, which is essentially what is contemplated in the process of embryonic stem cell research.
As I say, this is a dynamic field, which is precisely why we ought to listen to those voices. Many witnesses at the health committee called for a three year moratorium or a moratorium of some reasonable period on embryonic stem cell research to prohibit this troublesome procedure and to allow us to assess the development of science in this field. This is a procedure which involves the destruction and manipulation of a unique nascent human life and which therefore offends, I believe, the ethical and moral principles upon which liberal democracies such as Canada are founded without a consequent scientific or health benefit.
There has not been a single assertion of a demonstrated scientific empirical benefit from research on embryonic stem cells.
Why then would we authorize the manipulation and destruction of a nascent life even from the utilitarian perspective given that there is no utility in that material demonstrated by scientists to this point?
That is the fundamental question which we now face. That is why many members would like further consideration of the bill unless the government is prepared to listen to the health committee and split it.
Let me point out a peculiar and strange contradiction with respect to government policy in relation to this bill. The government claims that the language in the bill would ban all forms of human cloning, both therapeutic and reproductive, and I hope that is the case. Some testimony was presented in health committee which suggested that the definition found in the bill with respect to human cloning was not sufficiently broad and was too narrow to cover all forms of human cloning.
I am not a scientist so it is difficult for me to make that assessment. However, I am a politician and I hear the government stating on the one hand that it wishes to ban both therapeutic and reproductive cloning in the bill, but currently is taking a different position at the United Nations where it has supported the ratification of a draft treaty which would explicitly ban only reproductive cloning but not therapeutic cloning. That raises serious questions for me.
If the policy of the government, as reflected in Bill C-13, were to honestly and sincerely ban all forms of cloning as it claims, then why would that the same government, in New York today as reported in newspapers across the country, be advocating in favour of the legalization of reproductive non-therapeutic human cloning?
There is a dichotomy in the government's position with respect to this issue which raises reasonable doubt as to the intent of those who drafted the relevant sections of Bill C-13 to actually ban all forms of cloning, both therapeutic and reproductive. That is why the bill requires further and closer scrutiny.
Is it really the position of the government not to ban all forms of human cloning--an odious, nightmarish procedure, which gives man the power to play God and create the kind of nightmare society that writers like Aldous Huxley imagined and described--or is it the position of the government to recognize the miracle of human life and not try to replicate it ourselves?
If the latter is the case, then why is the government today taking the position at the United Nations that we should legalize internationally,--and not just in Canada--through the instrument of a UN treaty, the cloning of human beings for so-called therapeutic purposes, a procedure which is itself grossly offensive to any thinking person from a rational ethical perspective? Why is the government taking the position that unique individual human lives should be created to offer spare parts as science experiments and replicated, each possessing an unviolable dignity, to be used in the same fashion as used cars thrown out in a junk yard?
It is deeply offensive, however that is the position of the government as reported in today's Ottawa Citizen and Southam newspapers across the country.
I would ask all members to reflect seriously on exactly what Bill C-13 says. I would ask them not to take at face value the claims being offered by the health department which do not seem to be reflected by the government at the UN negotiations today in New York.
I would also encourage members to look very closely at the false, specious, unproven assertion that there is some putative health benefit from research on human embryos which requires their production and then destruction.