Mr. Speaker, I join in the applause for my colleague from Delta—South Richmond in his really brilliant remarks before this place. I think it was one of the most impressive interventions in this long debate. I gather this will be the last time that I rise on this bill. I have spoken to it several times, particularly at report stage, and I participated in some of the hearings of the Standing Committee on Health which studied the bill exhaustively.
I would like at the outset to commend all of those, including my friend from Mississauga South and particularly my colleague from Yellowhead, indeed the former member for Calgary Southwest and others, for having the courage and intellectual and political integrity to dig deeply into an extraordinarily complex issue, but one of great moral import. They have done what many other members have not in understanding that this bill is perhaps the most important that we will consider in the life of this Parliament. This is a bill that defines our values as a nation, which reflects whether or not Canada lives up to its true promise as a land of generosity and compassion and which respects inalienable human rights and human dignity.
I regret to say that the bill in its current form fails to live up to that standard. It fails to live up to what we aspire to be as Canadians, to be a welcoming and generous society to the weakest among us. The bill makes choices which are not necessary and which will lead to a further denigration of the inalienable right to life and the inalienable dignity of every human being.
Let me say at the outset what this bill seeks to do. I will then address what I regard as its deficiencies. I will finish with a meditation on my own voting intentions on this bill and how I have come to the conclusion that I have.
First of all, in my view the bill does contain many laudable elements. Among them is a prohibition on human cloning. Let me say parenthetically there had been some debate at committee and report stage about the efficacy of the bill's prohibition with respect to cloning. Indeed, some pointed to the testimony of Catholic University of America bioethicist Dr. Dianne Irving to the effect that the previous definition in the bill, the definition which stood when the bill was reported from the standing committee to the House, was insufficiently comprehensive to actually ban all forms of cloning technology.
Thanks to the member for Mississauga South, an amendment was adopted by the House which incorporated a far more comprehensive definition of what constitutes cloning. Consequently I am confident in asserting that the bill does indeed plainly ban cloning. That is clearly its intent. If the bill is passed and proclaimed, I believe that no malicious researcher, prosecutor or court could misinterpret the clear intent of Parliament to ban the odious, profoundly morally problematic technology of cloning.
The bill further bans the creation of human embryos for non-reproductive purposes, but there is a deep philosophical problem in the way that it does so, which I will revisit in a moment.
It prohibits experimentation on or usage of embryos after the 14th day of development. It prohibits manipulation for the purposes of sex selection. It prohibits other forms of genetic manipulation on nascent human life. It prohibits hybrids or chimera, although there is some question about the efficacy of that prohibition. I think it deals in an appropriate way with paid surrogacy. It prohibits the sale or trade in reproductive material and at least limits the momentum toward commodification of this technology in so doing. It would create, as we know, a regulatory agency to oversee research in these areas and to ensure the statutory prohibitions are respected, ostensibly in the promotion of “human dignity and rights” ethical principles.
Frankly, there is much to commend in the bill because today we have a complete and abhorrent legal vacuum in this country with respect to these technologies of manipulation of innocent, nascent human life. Legally, any one of these odious practices which regard the nascent human being as a means to a utilitarian end can proceed without any statutory prohibition or, indeed, regulation.
Clearly, twelve years after the report of the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies and two and a half years after the tabling of draft legislation in this place to address the absence of a law, it is time for us to be seized of the threat posed to human life and, indeed, the possibilities offered by some of these ethical technologies. That is why we do need to pass some form of legislation with respect to many of the matters covered in the bill.
However, let me focus now on my profound objections to the deficiencies of the bill. First let me say that the bill is predicated on a false philosophy of man, a false understanding of who we are as human beings and what gives us our dignity, wherein lies our claim to certain rights. Let me quote, for instance, a central and operative clause of the bill, clause 5, in which paragraph 5(1)(b), under the heading “Prohibited Activities”, reads:
No person shall knowingly
(b) create an in vitro embryo for any purpose other than creating a human being or improving or providing instruction in assisted reproduction procedures;--
This reflects a central flaw in the philosophy which undergirds the bill, in two respects. Saying that no person shall knowingly create an in vitro embryo for any purpose other than creating a human being suggests by implication that one could create an embryo for a purpose other than that of creating a human being. This is completely illogical.
It is tautological to say that the creation of an embryo leads to the creation of a human being. An embryo is the product of the fertilization of the reproductive genetic material of a mother and a father of the homo sapiens species. It can be no other than the offspring of human parentage. It is therefore, biologically speaking, human, and it is a being. It has its own independent momentum. It has its own independent genetic code. It has its own identity. It is a separate, living, organic human being.
To suggest that an embryo can be something other than a human being is to argue against elementary biology, elementary science and, indeed, an elementary philosophical understanding of what man is.
The second philosophical problem in this clause, which reflects the entire ethical framework of the bill, is that it defines the value of the human being not in what it is, but in what it can do. It defines the value of the human being in a utilitarian context.
The bill states:
No person shall knowingly
(b) create an in vitro embryo for any purpose other than creating a human being or improving or providing instruction in assisted reproduction procedures;--
What the bill states is that a human being can be created in vitro and can then have research performed on it, can be manipulated and can be destroyed. There is a verb that describes the destruction of a human life at whatever period, from its most nascent moment to its last possible moment of full maturity. When that human life is destroyed it is killed. To kill is the verb that describes the deliberate ending of a human life. Let us be plain about what we seek to authorize in the bill. We seek to give legal authorization for some, in the putative name of science, to kill human beings. Yes, they are tiny human beings, nascent human beings, human beings which offer no ostensible useful value to us, but human beings nevertheless.
Here lies the fundamental philosophical problem in the bill, which is this: Is a human being a means to an end which can be, under certain circumstances, even tightly regulated circumstances, regarded as a means to an end, or does the human being in every instance, from the moment of its creation, possess an inviolable dignity? This is the basic moral chasm that separates those who support and oppose the sorts of technologies which this bill seeks to govern.
For my part, I embrace the human view, the humane view, the moral view, that every human being possesses an inalienable dignity. In the words of one of the foundational documents of liberal democracy, the declaration of independence, words that can be embraced by people of goodwill in every culture: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men”, that is to say, all human beings, “are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights”, amongst which is the right to life.
To say “endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights” may be a politically incorrect reference. It may be politically incorrect to suggest that there is a higher authority whence derives our inalienable dignity, but in my view there is no other possible source. Indeed, we reflect this ancient wisdom in the preamble to our own Constitution Act, 1982, which states: “Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law...”.
That preamble, often dismissed and ignored, reflects the basic foundation of liberal democracy, which is that we possess inalienable rights endowed by an authority higher than ourselves, higher than the state, higher than any court, higher than any other man. And without such an authority endowing us with that dignity, then violence can be licitly done to that human dignity, which of course has happened with such reckless abandon in the history of the 20th century.
We now stand on the precipice of a new age of violating that inalienable human dignity if we permit these technologies that regard the human person as a means to an end, as a commodity for our use. If we embrace that ethic, then we continue the fundamental philosophical error of the 20th century that led to the deaths of so many. Let us not forget that the utilitarian ethic of biological sciences began in its most malicious form in Nazi Germany with the eugenics programs of the 1920s and 1930s.
Let us not forget that the first victims of totalitarianism in the 20th century were the mentally retarded, those deemed deficient, those who were seen as a means to an end, who did not possess in themselves an inalienable dignity but could be seen by scientists, and indeed by the state in that case, as simply human matériel to be used, whose biological material could be content for research and science in this glorious new age to improve the standard of of living of those of us deemed sufficiently perfect to benefit from that kind of manipulation of human life.
I submit that regarding the human person as a means to an end, regarding a human being at any stage of its development or existence as a legitimate basis for destruction in order to extract scientific knowledge or material, that basic error in this bill reflects the basic error of the Nazi eugenics program of the 1920s and 1930s. We must not go down that road.
What I say perhaps sounds extreme, because it seems so much more benign to simply extract a little tiny embryo the size of the head of a pin and manipulate it scientifically. After all, it does not look like a human person and it does not have the emotions of a fully mature human person, but it is a human person nevertheless. If we begin to make the distinction of what constitutes human personhood on the basis of external characteristics, the presence of personality or consciousness, then we enter a slippery slope, again which leads only to violence and destruction of human life and threatens the dignity of us all. That is my fundamental objection to the bill.
Let me say that for all of what I have said, I have seriously considered voting for the bill for the following reason: because, as I said at the outset, we currently live in a complete legal vacuum with respect to controlling the regulation of these technologies. As deeply imperfect as this bill is, I have been tempted to support it in order to enshrine in legislation such provisions as the ban on cloning, the prohibition of genetic material for the purpose of sex selection, the ostensible prohibition of human hybrids and chimera, the commodification of reproductive material, et cetera.
In this, I am governed by the moral teachings to which I make reference in these questions, and I quote from chapter 73 of the encyclical letter of the Gospel of Life by His Holiness John Paul II where he says that:
A particular problem of conscience can arise in cases where a legislative vote would be decisive for the passage of a more restrictive law... in place of a more permissive law already passed or ready to be voted on. Such cases are not infrequent...In a case [such as this], when it is not possible to overturn or completely abrogate an [anti-life] law, an elected official, whose absolute personal opposition to procured abortion was well known, could licitly support proposals aimed at limiting the harm done by such a law and at lessening its negative consequences at the level of general opinion and public morality. This does not in fact represent an illicit cooperation with an unjust law, but rather a legitimate and proper attempt to limit its evil aspects.
Governed by that, I and others in this place have sought to ameliorate this bill, have sought to improve it. I put before the House an amendment which would have had the effect of banning embryonic stem cell research and which, sadly, was defeated by a vote of 160 to 40.
Yet, after much consideration, I have come to the conclusion that I will vote against this bill. I do so in the hope and belief that its defeat would compel the government to adopt the initial recommendation of the health committee to split the bill, to pass expeditiously those aspects prohibiting cloning and other of the most odious procedures and would allow us to draft a bill which more closely would reflect the values which I have outlined in my speech about the enviable dignity of the human person as it relates to embryonic stem cell research.