Mr. Speaker, Dr. Françoise Baylis of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research did a funded research study which showed that only about 500 human embryos were in storage at fertility clinics, half of which were still being used for fertility treatment. Of the 250 remaining, half of them will not survive the thawing process. Out of the remaining 125 that do survive thawing, only 9 will be able to produce any form of stem cells and, of those 9, only about 5 will actually be stem cells that will be of the research quality necessary to do meaningful research.
The bottom line is that there are not enough surplus embryos in Canada to sustain meaningful research. That means there will be pressure on Canada to go to somatic cell nuclear transfer to permit this kind of cloning. It is being done in the U.K. and the U.K. has already destroyed over 30,000 human embryos for this research, and the only way it has got it is through somatic cell nuclear transfer.
Those are my concerns. I hope this issue will not be coming back before Parliament and that Parliament's decision to ban human cloning is full and final.