Madam Speaker, it is good to be here addressing Bill C-13 and in particular the Group No. 5 amendments. I will begin by speaking generally about the bill and then come back to the amendments as my colleague has just done.
This is one of the most important bills that has come forward in the House since I was elected. It is also the most important that has come forward in a long time because of the potential it has to affect our society and our culture over the next decades.
It is important to note that there are a number of aspects of the bill that are worthy of support in the bill. We support the ban on therapeutic cloning. It is important to have restrictions immediately. We support the ban on chimeras, animal-human hybrids, and sex selection that would be done deliberately. We support the ban on germ line alteration. We support the ban on buying and selling embryos. We think those kinds of things need to be prevented in Canada.
We support the idea of an agency which would regulate this sector. We want changes to the type of agency that has been presented, but it is essential that there be an agency that oversees this sector and what would become this industry.
It is important that the agency be directly accountable to Parliament. I had the opportunity to sit in on a couple of health committee meetings. The director for the Canadian Institute for Health Information appeared before the committee. It seemed that he really felt that he was allowed to run ahead of the legislation. The attitude that I saw that day was that the scientists should be making the decisions and the legislators should be sitting aside. I disagree with that. We have been given the responsibility to oversee legislation and to oversee what is going on in the country.
The preamble of the bill highlights a couple of things. First, it talks about the health and well-being of children, in particular the children that will be born through assisted human reproduction and the fact that those children must be given priority. The second point highlights that human individuality and diversity, and the integrity of the human genome must be preserved and protected. We agree with those concepts, but we also have concerns in those areas.
We support the recognition that the health and well-being of children born through assisted human reproductive technology should be given priority. In fact, the health committee in its deliberations came up with the ranking of priorities for the decision making around this technology. It stated: first, that children born through AHR need to be considered; second, that adults participating in these procedures need to be considered; and third, that the priorities of researchers and physicians that conduct AHR must be subject to both the children who are born and the adults who are participating in those procedures.
We realize that the preamble recognizes the priority of assisted human reproductive offspring. Other clauses of the bill fail to meet the same standards, the standard of children born through donor insemination or through donor eggs are not given the right to know the identity of their biological parents. There was a discussion in the chamber last week about the importance of those children who are born through reproductive technology needing to have some connection to their biological parents. The bill does not address that.
The bill's preamble does not provide an acknowledgement of human dignity or a respect for human life. I think it is important for that to be in the bill.
In my last speech on the bill I spoke about human life and that generally scientists have come to the conclusion and agree that life begins at conception. It really begins when the DNA package is created and there is little disagreement about that. The disagreement is in what value we give to that life once it is created.
I spent some time speaking about how important it is that we give value to human life and that we see it as valuable from conception right through to the end of natural life. The bill's preamble does not acknowledge human dignity or the specific respect for human life.
It is interesting that it is intimately connected with human life and the creation of it. Yet there is no overarching principle of the recognition of the value of human life. As I pointed out in a speech the other day this is a grave deficiency in the bill.
In our minority report from this side of the House we recommended that the final legislation clearly recognize that the human embryo is a human life and that the statutory declaration include the phrase “respect for human life”. We would say it is important that it be legislatively defined. We need to make an amendment to the bill. The preamble and the mandate of the agency should also be amended to include a reference to the principle of respect for human life.
In our motions today we are talking about research using human embryos. The bill would allow a number of things with human embryos. It would allow experiments on human embryos under five different conditions. First, only in vitro leftover embryos from the IVF process could be used for research; and second, embryos could not be created for research, with one exception: they can be created for purposes of improving or providing instruction in AHR processes. I would think that exception is too broad as it really does open up the door to almost anything.
Third, written permission for experimentation on human embryos must be given by the donor, although in this case the donor is singular, not plural, and it should be plural; and fourth, research on human embryos is permitted if the use is necessary. Again, necessary is undefined.
This takes me back to the problem the government seems to have in defining legislation. I think back to the debate that we had on child pornography where the courts ruled that artistic merit was allowed and in John Robin Sharpe's case it was a good enough defence for his material. The government came back in response to that and suggested that we need to replace the defence of artistic merit with the public good. The member for Port Moody—Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam pointed out the other day that the definition of public good would broaden the allowance for child pornography rather than narrow it. We have a number of situations in places where the government is unable to make the definitions necessary to put boundaries in these situations.
The research on human embryos is allowed if the use is necessary, whatever that means. The bill would also allow for experiments on human embryos if those human embryos were destroyed after 14 days.
We have some concerns about embryonic research. I have some concerns personally as well. The research is definitely controversial as it divides Canadians. There are numerous petitions being tabled in the House weekly regarding the situation. Clearly, it is an issue that is very important to Canadians.
The embryonic stem cell research inevitably would result in the death of the embryo. Life would not go on. For many Canadians this would violate the commitment to respect human dignity, to respect integrity, and to respect human life.
Embryonic research would constitute an objectification of human life. It is very important that we do no move into that direction. Life cannot become a tool which can be manipulated and destroyed for other ends.
The amendments today deal with a number of those things, but we have great and grave concerns about the movement toward embryonic stem cell research, particularly when adult stem cells provide far better means and opportunities for scientists to do their research.
In fact, a lot of the embryonic stem cell research has had some terrible results where cells have begun to grow out of control. People have had tumours where operations have been done in which embryonic stem cells have been inserted. Operations have had to be performed to reverse the effects of what had been done.
In conclusion, I would say there are some things that are good about Bill C-13 that we would support, but there are many areas in which the bill needs to be improved, particularly in the area of embryonic stem cell research.