Mr. Speaker, it is an honour today to speak to this Liberal motion. We have a moment in time because we are hosting this year's G8 and G20 summits, a moment in time when we could have the most profound impact upon the health of the world's poorest than we have seen in decades.
The reason the Liberal Party has put this motion has to do with a number of comments made by the government that have obscured the message of what we should be doing at this great moment in time. I will quote a couple of those comments.
The Minister of International Cooperation said, “family planning measures are going to never be part of that group”, i.e. what will be discussed at the G20 summit.
On March 16, the Minister of Foreign Affairs said, “It does not deal, in any way, shape or form, with family planning to be the purpose of this”, i.e. the plan of action in the G20 and G8 meetings is to save lives.
What we are dealing with here is not a political issue. It is a medical issue and a humanitarian issue. I want to describe some of the challenges and problems that are faced with maternal and international health and put forward a plan of action to deal with this problem. I sincerely hope, as I am sure do all colleagues across the House and all of the opposition parties, the government takes this opportunity to implement what works from a scientific basis. We have heard from many of my colleagues today, from my party and others, how to do this.
The challenge is that right now, every minute of every day, a woman dies as a consequence of or during pregnancy. That is 530,000 women every year. They essentially die from five largely preventable causes. Women bleed, hemorrhage and babies get stuck in obstructed labour They get infections, sepsis and something called eclampsia where the blood pressure goes high, they get seizures and they die. Also, 63,000 women a year die as a result of septic abortions, abortions they get because they have no other option.
What does that mean? It means that when the mother dies more than half of her children who are under the age of five also die. Many members of the House do not understand that. The death of the mother presages a death of most of her children under the age of five, which leaves not only a sea of orphans but also a sea of children who die, which is completely unnecessarily. This is devastating to the economy and the social cohesiveness of these countries. Most of these deaths are occurring in developing countries.
How do we deal with this? It is true, and the government is correct to say, that health systems are the key. It really is focusing on the basics: having a trained health care worker, access to the proper medications and diagnostics, clean water and proper nutrition, and access to a full array of family planning options, including access to abortions in those countries where it is legal.
The World Health Organization talks about this in a very important way. It says that family planning allows individuals to have the desired number and spacing of children by the use of contraceptive measures and treat involuntary fertility.
In other words, family planning is voluntary and contraception is tailored to the individual needs. We cannot try to foist our morals on other people, and no one is suggesting that for a moment, but we need to support that which is known to work and that which is legal in the countries that we are trying to assist congruent with what they want.
Why are we so focused on family planning? It we can provide people with family planning, it will save more than one-third of the 530,000 women who die every year while they are pregnant. Can anyone Imagine that one-third of those women's lives would be saved, including the lives of 50% of the children who die during early childhood? If the government wants to truly save lives, then needs to follow the science and enable people to access a full array of family planning options.
While the government has spoken about not opening the door on the abortion issue, we say, amen. However, if it does not want to open the door to the abortion issue then the logical conclusion is that we must give people the rights that currently exist, and one of those rights in our country is a woman's right to a safe abortion. Why is the government preventing women in other countries from having the same rights as women in our country?
If Canadian men and women did not have access to a full array of family planning options, we would have a much higher rate of maternal mortality and infant mortality.
In our country things are not all homogenous. There are segments and elements in our country, particularly in first nations communities and in rural communities, where maternal mortality and infant mortality rates are too high. Most Canadians would be shocked to know that our country, which spends the fifth highest amount on a per capita basis than any other country in the world, has the 22nd highest rate of infant mortality in the world. What kind of a situation is that? That is a national shame. The government should work with our provincial counterparts to deal with this.
When it comes to family planning, which this is important from a medical perspective, if women have the ability to control their own fertility, in other words, allowing them to space their children out and not having them when they are too young or too old, then they would be able to have their children at the correct age and with the correct spacing between them. This is a long established right, one that is recognized by the United Nations.
On the abortion issue, in 1994 in Cairo, members of the United Nations, including our own, agreed that women should have the right to safe abortions in those countries where it is legal.
More than 80,000 women die as a consequence of iron deficiency anemia every year. Dr. Zlotkin from the U of T and many others in Canada have championed the micronutrient initiative, which we call pennies from heaven. We call it pennies from heaven because a small investment goes a long way toward saving not only a mother's life but also the lives of children.
As I said before, if we get the health system right, if we can treat the pregnant woman, which is millennium development goal five, then we can also treat 80% of those who go through a hospital emergency department. I am speaking of the big killers like gastroenteritis, pneumonia, tuberculosis, malaria, malnutrition and HIV-AIDS.
The government speaks about wanting to be effective in terms of using taxpayer money, which we are all behind that, but if it wants to be most effective and make the most effective, sensible, cost effective use of taxpayer money, then the answer is family planning. Access to family planning is the most cost-effective way to improve the health of populations, as well as improve the economy and the environment.This is absolutely crucial. It is hard to understand why the government would not allow this to happen.
I also want to talk about the government's position on a few other areas related to this.
In Vancouver, Drs. Montaner, Thomas Kerr, Evan Wood and others have come up with a seek and treat program for those with HIV-AIDS. In my province of British Columbia, 12,000 people are HIV positive, the highest in Canada on a per capita basis. At the Centre for Excellence, Dr. Montaner and his team have put forward a program called Seek and Treat. They are also the champions of HAART therapy, the highly active, antiretroviral therapy treatment. They will use this to seek and treat undiagnosed people who are HIV positive. This is profound because the HAART therapy allows people who are HIV positive to receive triple therapy. If they receive this treatment, the viral particles can be dropped so low that they are actually prevented from infecting others. This is the most positive new evidence we have to curb this pandemic.
What is the government doing for harm reduction strategies like this? It has actually taken the Insite program in British Columbia that Dr. Montaner and his team championed and, remarkably, is taking it to court to prevent patients from having access to this program that is saving lives.
What kind of a government is actually depriving people from being able to access known, proven lifesaving initiatives? For all of those who are watching, that is what the government is doing today. It is actually standing in the way of lifesaving measures, including the Insite program in Vancouver, and is using the courts to do so.
The lower courts said that evidence from The Lancet to the The New England Journal of Medicine showed that this particular initiative saves lives and that governments must allow patients to access the program. What does the Conservative government do? No, it said, it could not allow this because it violated the government's sense of ideology. The government stands in the way and is actually going to the courts to block a lifesaving measure.
The reason the Liberal Party has put this motion forward is that the government has started to change its tale a little bit, stating it is not going to close the door on any family planning options but is also not going to open the book on abortion.
What does that mean? It could mean a lot of things. It is very different from saying it is going to enable people to access family planning, that it is going to bring it to the G8 and G20 tables and work with the most powerful leaders in the world to include this as part of an integrated plan to save women, men, and children's lives.
If the government does not do this, then not only does it mean the death of millions of women and children that could have been prevented, but it will also prevent many men and women from living through the HIV-AIDS issue. What the government in effect has been saying up until very recently is that it is not going to promote simple, well-known options for people to protect themselves from the spread of HIV.
What kind of government can possibly get it into its mind that it is going to deprive people from having the tools they need to protect themselves from HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases? It is absolutely inconceivable.
Unless the government wants to tell us something else, the thing that is driving this is ideology. The reason we put the reference to President Bush in the motion is that President Bush put an obligation on U.S. aid and the PEPFAR program that they were not going to fund anybody, group or country who was in any way, shape or form going to enable women to have access to safe abortions.
I want to discuss this, just for a second, if I may. Far from the comfort of this particular room, something else is going on. As a physician who has worked in Africa right next to a war zone, I have seen some pretty horrible things. One of the shames of the world is the use of rape as a tool in conflict. In places like the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 70% of the women in some communities have been raped and gang raped. What option does that woman have if she has been gang raped and is pregnant?
Can the government members truly look into their own hearts, in their Christian hearts if they are Christian, and ask themselves if they could look that woman in the eyes and say, “We are going to prevent you from having an abortion even though you want one, even though if you take this fetus to term you will be a pariah and cannot handle it, which will be psychologically devastating to you”, for whatever reasons she may have.
If members of the government look in their hearts, do they truly think they can also look at that woman today and say, “No, you will not have access to a abortion.” I would ask them to reflect on that, because that is the reality in too many countries in the world. It is the dark side of too many countries in the conflict zones in our world today. We would like to believe that it does not happen, but it is the reality in too many counties in the world. That is why the world has agreed to what is known as an integrated series of options and initiatives to enable us to save the lives of children, men, and women, as the government says it wants to do.
It is this series or bucket of solutions, which I have articulated here, that is science and fact based. The Prime Minister actually supported this last year. What the Prime Minister signed onto at last year's G8 summit in Rome is the following. The summit members, including the Prime Minister, committed to “accelerate progress on maternal health, including through sexual and reproductive health care and services and voluntary family planning”.
The people at the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, including Maureen McTeer, Dr. Lalonde, and Dr. Dorothy Shaw, who is one of the key people and our spokesperson on the G8 and G20 and part of the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, and others, have articulated very clearly, dispassionately, factually and scientifically a series of initiatives that Canada could and should embrace based on the science.
I understand the sensitivities of members on the other side about the abortion issue. They may be personally opposed to it. That is their right, but they do not have the right to deprive other people of what will save their lives. That is the crux of the matter and that is why we have tabled this motion today.
It is also a moment in time when Canada is going to lead. We are going to lead at the G8 and G20 summits. If the government simply puts out these very vague terms saying that it is not going to close the door on anything in particular and it is not going to open the book on abortion, it should come clean about what it is going to do.
This is how it can happen. Right now the sherpas are meeting and this month the foreign ministers will be meeting in Gatineau. The month thereafter the development ministers will be meeting. What they need to do is to come up with an integrated plan. The inputs are known and the tasks be divided up so that each G8 member country takes a leadership role in each of these particular areas. One country could do health human resources and others could do water, power, micronutrients and family planning. Each country therefore could take a leadership role.
The sherpas should be part of an ongoing working group to implement that plan. There would be one plan of action based on the science, one implementing mechanism and one oversight and reporting mechanism to taxpayers in the countries. Of course, all of this should be transparent. As the Prime Minister has said, he wants transparency and accountability. We are all in favour of that, and it is what they need to do. They need to post and record what they are doing. They could even partner with different groups in our country.
There is an initiative now with some of our universities, called the Centres for International Health and Development. Essentially, the government has the opportunity to link up our universities with institutions in developing countries, using our universities as a way to capacity-build based on what the recipient countries want. That is a functional way the government can implement a lot of these measures, partnering with NGOs, universities, and international partners like UNFPA, and domestic partners like ACPD and others to implement what we know needs to be done to save lives.
It would be unacceptable for the Liberal Party to let the government off the hook. We are not going to buy into vague statements by the government that are meant to obscure this issue. However, we will work with the government to implement what is necessary to save mothers' lives, men's lives and children's lives.
I want to appeal to the sense of humanity of the members of government. If they could look beyond their own personal ideologies for a moment and put themselves in the shoes of somebody who lives in a country far way, or even in some communities in our country, and consider the difficult choices that people sometimes have to make to protect themselves and save the lives of their children and families, I would ask them to consider what they would need to save their own lives and those of their families. The only conclusion they can arrive at is to allow others to have access to the same options that all of us have, whether we choose to embrace them or not, and allow everybody to have the full range of primary health care services, including access to a full range of family planning options and the ability to have a safe abortion where legal.
I would ask the members to look into their hearts and allow this, because failure on this will result in millions of lost lives. Do they want to save lives or not? That is what I will leave them with.