Mr. Speaker, this is the second time I have risen to speak to Bill C-13 because of the very strong and serious concerns we have.
This is an area of uncharted waters and the bill can have very serious ethical and moral complications. Therefore, it is very necessary, before we pass the bill, to take a step back, look at it very carefully and then decide as a society what exactly we want to do.
My colleagues on this side of the House and a number of members on the government side as well have stated their objections to the bill. This issue affects everybody. We cannot take it lightly. As I said the last time I spoke to the bill, we have some very serious concerns because we see loopholes in the bill of which individuals could take advantage and which could start us off in a direction that later on we may regret.
Let me talk about what Bill C-13 is about. It is about human cloning. It is about reproductive technology. These are the issues now before the Canadian Parliament. A commission has looked into this, with the former prime minister's wife as one of the commissioners. Our former leader, Mr. Preston Manning, spent a huge amount of time studying this topic. Because of the concerns that have arisen with the bill and the loopholes that exist, members on all sides of the House of Commons, from all parties, are expressing serious concern.
As I mentioned, there are loopholes. They give us an uneasy feeling. I do not understand why we cannot have very tight controls on this until we are positive and we know in which direction we are going with research. Why would the government not put those controls in place? We do not know.
Even with what is happening at the United Nations, what the government is trying to do, we do not know. An international convention to ban human cloning is being debated at the United Nations right now. One resolution, which is backed by the U.S. and several other countries, calls for a comprehensive ban on all human cloning, reproductive and therapeutic. That would be consistent with what the government is trying to do with Bill C-13, which would prohibit the creation of human cloning by any technique. That is fair enough, but there is another resolution out there, which calls for a ban on only reproductive cloning. Strangely enough, the government is supporting that resolution.
On one hand the government is supporting a resolution that calls for a complete ban on cloning, but on the other hand it is supporting another resolution that says the ban is only for reproductive cloning. Why this double standard? What is the government trying to say? We just do not seem to understand the direction the government is taking.
As my colleague who spoke before me said, the government is now trying to ram through the bill because I guess the Prime Minister wants to leave a legacy. It is on his agenda and he wants to do it, but it may have serious implications in the future. We wonder why we cannot debate the bill. Why can the bill not go back to the committee? Why can all these loopholes we have indicated not be tightened? Why can it not be explained to us exactly what the government's agenda is? We seem to be getting conflicting reports.
For example, in May 2001 the former minister of health supported an international convention to prevent human cloning. The resolution said no more human cloning and everybody agreed with that. Speaking in Geneva at the meeting of the WHO, the former minister gave his support for a resolution condemning cloning as “ethically unacceptable and contrary to human dignity”.
We have conflicting messages coming from the government. It does not know in which direction it wants to go or what it wants to do. Therefore, Canadians are a little wary. We are wary of the bill. Where is the bill going? It becomes even more disturbing to us with the loophole I have mentioned.
Is it on the government's agenda to allow therapeutic cloning to go ahead? If it is on the government's agenda, then it should say that so Canadians can know exactly what the government means. What does the government want with the bill? Why create a bill that has loopholes? Why go to the UN with two different positions? Nobody knows where Canada stands on this issue. We have to wonder what the government's hidden agenda is. Even the government members who are opposing this legislation do not seem to know where their government is headed on this issue.
As I have said, human cloning, being a new technology, goes against all ethical and moral teachings in society. We of course do know that stem cells have a very strong research value. We also know that stem cell research is needed because of its very good therapeutic advantages. But those are adult stem cells.
It is time for us to take a step back and say we should not have human cloning but we should go ahead with adult stem cell research. That way, we will know precisely where we are going and when we go into these uncharted waters we will know in which direction we are going. Why would we try to navigate uncharted waters and find ourselves beached in an area where we never wanted to go?
We have all heard of the lady in Paris who said her group had attempted to clone the first human being, but we now know that story was not true. That lady in Paris said her group had done the first human cloning. I am certainly glad it did not happen. Of course we all know the story of Dolly the sheep. Do we really need to go that way?
I can say without a doubt that Canadians do not accept human cloning in any capacity. The majority does not. We do not want to go into that area. Since we do not, we need to stand up and say in the clearest terms that we will not accept any bill that has the potential, as Bill C-13 does, for loopholes that can lead us in that direction.
In conclusion, my party will not agree with Bill C-13 because of our reservations.