Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from the Bloc Quebecois. It is with great pleasure that I rise in the House today because this is a very important debate for the New Democratic caucus.
I am very pleased to participate in the debate on a bill that addresses as important an area as Canadians' approach to assisted reproductive technology. As we have heard throughout the debate, there are many compelling reasons to support the regulation of reproductive technology.
We are all familiar with the sensational stories about human cloning, about eggs being sold over the Internet, and about the acrimonious lawsuits over surrogacy. Last December the Raelians claimed to have successfully cloned a human being. While that claim may be unsubstantiated, it certainly shows the need for urgent action. It is but the outspoken tip of a much larger iceberg of unregulated research. We know, and I am sure all members in the House agree, that there are others around the globe who are absolutely committed to this and other dubious research objectives.
We are living in a time when the term “designer babies” has become part of the North American vocabulary. Parents are selecting the biological traits of their children. Internet sites compete in the trade of celebrity reproductive materials while countless others profit from those Canadians who are more than willing to buy access to any healthy eggs or sperm that might assist in their drive to have children. Gender selection has become topical with all sorts of new rationales being put forward in its defence.
Many of us by now are very familiar with some of the less sensational personal stories that have emerged from these technological innovations. There are stories of joy and heartbreak, as well as sacrifice and pain during infertility treatment.
Reproductive technologies have become widespread in Canada yet unfortunately, they remain beyond the reach of government regulations. Therefore, the debate on this piece of legislation remains critically important.
The question for all of us here today is, what took so long? Why did it take more than 10 years to get to the point where we are actually debating a concrete piece of legislation that may be passed through the legislative process? We all know that Liberal neglect by delaying the introduction of this legislation has allowed developments in reproductive technology to mushroom outside a regulated environment. No one more than New Democrats in the House want this situation changed.
Cloning and gender selection are areas where Canadians have expressed unqualified support for regulation for a good number of years, going back to over a decade ago and the recommendations of the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies which reported in 1993. The Liberal government has had ample opportunity to move quickly to stabilize the clinical and research environments. If it was unable to come up with a strategy of its own, it could easily have thrown its support behind a private member's bill presented to the House by a member of the Bloc, a bill to ban cloning, for example, or accepted agreement among other parties to expedite certain areas to introduce some legislative standards quickly. The government chose not to. Instead it opted to plow ahead and even trampled over health committee suggestions for improving its bill.
After failing in its previous attempt at regulating reproductive technologies in 1997, the Liberal government has left us today with a no win, no choice decision, a trouble or nothing kind of proposition. As we said earlier in the debate, that is a choice we cannot make. It is a choice we refuse to make because several major issues have not been adequately dealt with in this final legislative proposition before the House of Commons. Several major issues have not been adequately dealt with that will govern the application of the research and technology that we are addressing.
I want to list some of those concerns, starting with the paramount concern for those of us in the New Democratic Party and I hope many others in this chamber, and that is the health of women. It is women's safety that remains our concern here today. From the beginning of the whole process with the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies, New Democrats have been working, fighting and insisting that women's health concerns be paramount.
A colleague of mine, Dawn Black, the former NDP status of women critic, was very adamant about this point here in the House. She consulted extensively with organizations representing women from across Canada in developing recommendations for the royal commission itself. She pursued those concerns through the parliamentary process and was as disappointed as other women across the country when legislative initiatives did not come to fruition.
Dawn Black and other women across the country knew then and know today that it is women who put their health at risk by undergoing drug regimes with unsafe products. It is women who undergo the painful intrusive procedures to secure eggs for treatment or research for example. It is women who must try to make informed decisions about the pressure of societal expectations and commercial service promoters.
Many have commented on this issue. I want to reference the work done in February 2001 by Anne Rochon Ford, who wrote in a paper entitled “Biotechnology and the New Genetics, What it Means for Women's Health”:
Particularly in the area of reproductive health, women receive a disproportionate percentage of medical tests including genetic tests and treatments. Many treatments and technologies once promoted to women as safe and effective were later found to cause harm.
She listed three: the hormone drug DES; the Dalkon Shield IUD; and of course as well we all know, the Meme breast implant.
Once again women are being asked to trust and comply with new technologies such as genetic testing and gene therapies about which relatively little is known. As the author went on to say, it is like being asked to take a leap into the genetic darkness.
That point is no more relevant than today with the news on CBC radio about its investigative reporting on unsafe medical devices which are currently on the market. The problem continues. We remain concerned that the government has not taken seriously the need to protect the health and well-being of Canadians at all costs and to ensure that the drugs we take, the medical devices that are on the market, the food we eat, the interventions that are made are safe beyond a reasonable doubt.
With today's news about Canadians who depend on implanted medical devices experiencing harm and danger as a result of using those devices, we ought to be concerned again when we acknowledge the fact that Bill C-13 does not do the utmost to ensure that the health and well-being of women are protected at all costs.
We tried very hard in committee to make those changes. We were successful to some extent, but on some very major issues we were not. Although we were able to improve the significance of women's health within the bill's principles at committee, the government has stubbornly refused to make precaution the overriding principle in terms of women's health.
If, as the government claims, the bill is concerned with women's health, what better way of giving that claim leverage for enforcement purposes than to state outright that the precautionary principle is the governing principle? Yet every single time we proposed amendments to entrench precaution, to ensure that the principle was imprinted in the legislation, our efforts were defeated by Liberal members.
We wanted to require the federal government to ensure that reproductive technologies, drugs and procedures specifically, are proven safe before they are introduced, that the risks and benefits of any treatment are fully disclosed and that the evaluation of reproductive health services include women's experiences.
Let me raise another issue of concern to us with respect to Bill C-13 that we have before us. It has to do with prevention. While it is crucial to have a regulatory framework within which these activities take place or do not take place, the intent of the bill should not be the creation of an industry. Our goal should be the reduction, as much as possible, of infertility in our society today. That overriding motivation would surely require the integration of an active prevention strategy as a critical element in the role of the new agency being created under Bill C-13.
When we were working at committee on the legislation, we proposed a stronger prevention mandate. Interestingly, this was again resisted by the government that in turn insisted on a narrow approach to a very broad issue. Unfortunately that has been the pattern. This is quite consistent with the government's overall approach to industrial and environmental health. Prevention is so much better for women but treatment is so much better for industry. For the government, that is unfortunately no contest.
Let me go on to briefly talk about a fundamental concern for New Democrats in the whole legislative process and that has to do with commercialization and commodification of reproductive technologies.
Many Canadians have expressed concern from the very beginning of the formal public discussion about reproductive technologies back in the 1980s. They have expressed concerns about the government agenda being driven by powerful biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries whose primary obligation is to their shareholders and not to women's health.
There is nothing in the bill, particularly relating to the control of research results, that distinguishes between the government's position and the interests of these industries. We raised the issue of patents and the need to ensure public access to the benefit of research. For us, patenting remains a critical issue.
Patenting remains for the government a separate issue while for most Canadians, and certainly New Democrats, questions of research and the control and application of research results are inexorably linked.
There is the recent experience with Myriad, the U.S. genetics company that developed genetic cancer screening techniques which it only made available at considerable expense, clearly demonstrating the hazards ahead.
We have to deal with gene patenting issues here and now, not off in Industry Canada stakeholder discussions but as an integral part of this debate on the future pertaining to women's health and the use of assisted reproductive technologies.
To ensure public interest was primary, we focused attention on the makeup of the board directing the assisted human reproduction agency. We have repeatedly cited the need to ensure the independence of decisions and advice made by the agency in its role as chief policy advisory body to the government on reproductive technology.
When the legislation was introduced, my colleagues in the NDP and I noticed immediately and were particularly horrified to find that the government had included no conflict of interest guidelines at all. We proposed and the health committee adopted strong requirements that would avoid potential conflicts. What happened? The government introduced an amendment at report stage that cut our proposal and the teeth out of the conflict of interest provisions.
The government claims to want to keep reproductive technology out of the commercial realm. We encourage the government to put some flesh on the bones of that sentiment. We encourage the government to follow the Manitoba government's example in returning private for profit clinics to the non-profit public sphere. This bill could have set that agenda.
By leaving clinics in the private, competitive, for profit sphere the government has provided no assurance at all that some more complicated procedures may not become inaccessible to women as commercial firms drop them to keep their success rates high.
The federal government's de facto encouragement of for profit services in the recent health accord further confirms that women will be at the mercy of service decisions made according to market values in reproductive health.
The law of the marketplace has consistently failed to protect women's interests over the years. The commodification of women's bodies plays right into the hands of those who would profit. There is nothing in the bill to indicate the proactive approach to enforcement necessary to ensure women's safety. The government's under resourcing of other health monitoring is not encouraging at all.
Let me go on to the issue briefly of surrogacy because this is another area where the health committee hammered out a solid recommendation that was either rejected outright or substantially weakened by the government during report stage.
It was the committee's position that permitting commercial surrogacy arrangements would commercialize women's childbearing capacity. With government supported amendments, we are now left with a confusing mixed message that tries to accomplish two contradictory goals at the same time: banning paid surrogacy activity on the one hand, while simultaneously supporting it financially on the other hand.
In some ways other aspects of the bill have been overshadowed by the controversy surrounding research options using human stem cells. After careful and lengthy consideration, the health committee had reached a common position on stem cell research. Instead of adopting that position however, the government has decided to pass what is essentially a policy decision off to an administrative agency.
In the last minute available to me, I would like to just touch briefly on the matter of eugenics because much of the bill deals with the technological capacity which was still in the realm of science fiction a brief quarter of a century ago. The selection of genetic traits, as much as cloning, falls within this brave new world. The magnitude of these discoveries would to most Canadians beg a thoughtful and critical examination of their relationship to our traditional societal values. We have reached this critical point, however, with no government leadership around such a public evaluation.
As it stands, the bill does not clearly set out a set of guiding principles that would recognize and safeguard the value and integrity of the lives of all Canadians. It fails to clearly challenge the assumptions held by some researchers whose overall goal is to perfect future generations and eliminate certain conditions through genetic manipulation.
The concerns that have been raised by groups representing persons with disabilities about the value and contributions of all members of our society have not been met. We made constructive proposals to strengthen this aspect of the bill in committee and tried successfully to introduce an amendment at report stage. Regrettably, we have been forced to once again resort to a private member's initiative to deal with the concerns of groups representing people with disabilities.
Finally, we are at the end of a long process. In many ways our work is just beginning because provisions around the agency have been left wide open for further regulations and depend very much on government commitments in terms of appointments to the board and truly acting on the possibility of conflict of interest.
We must remain vigilant. We must remain purposeful in our deliberations to ensure that the health and well-being of women, children and families is preserved and protected throughout this process of regulating reproductive technologies.