Reg Alcock

[Main Estimates, 2002-2003, June 6th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I was regrettably absent for the former vote. I would like my vote recorded as voting with the government.

[Supply, June 6th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask the member a question on the substance of the motion rather than the tedious litany that his research bureau has put together for him.

The motion says that these overpayments should be forgiven completely. Given that this was a mutual error, does he not think that the provinces bear some responsibility?

[Points of Order, June 4th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I listened to the member's point of order and I want to correct one thing. He made reference to the fact that it had been suggested that I would be the chair of that committee. That question was put to me also and I specifically said that was not the case. I have said it twice on television and in other forums.

I was involved in some of the thinking, as were other members, in how this committee might be created and that is all.

[Assisted Human Reproduction Act, May 21st, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, just on that final point, perhaps I read this wrong. The member is right, section 14(1) does not say the name of the person. It does say that health reporting information is required to be collected under the regulations. The regulations are not attached to the bill so we do not know how broadly or narrowly that is drawn.

I would agree that in my read of the bill, it does not answer some of the questions that I had about how the second process would take place. There are two parts to it. There is the actual identity of the parent or parents who are missing in the mix. That could be handled more directly. I also think the whole issue of preparing parents for parenthood when they are not going through the process of gestation is an important issue. That is also lacking in the bill.

Beyond that, the bill actually does not do a bad job of reflecting the consensus to which we came. Maybe we are looking at it through different lenses, however it comes fairly close to our intention, which is to control a very difficult and very contentious area of research but not eliminate it.

[Assisted Human Reproduction Act, May 21st, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, on the issue of children, the bill does try to address some of the privacy and access questions. People are not allowed to donate reproductive material without being willing to have their identity disclosed.

The act of carrying a child and the whole process one goes through preparing their family for that child is a period of time for thought and reflection. It is a period of time for adjustment. For somebody adopting a child there is a need for preparation. When people apply to adopt a child they go through all sorts of processes before they are approved. If surrogacy is involved where someone else carries the child, an individual could become the parent of the child without having gone through anything other than painting the bedroom.

Some children do not fit into those types of homes and are very seriously damaged by that fact. We have lots of examples of that. Should there not be more structure and education in this type of situation? Part of the issue here is that it is the responsibility of the provinces. They manage those types of cases. The department intends to raise these issues with the provinces and look at ways by which these kinds of activities could be brought under that same gambit. An agency will have the same broad regulatory powers as the department itself has.

My comment with regard to scientists was not to say that all scientists were perfect, that nobody had a self-interest and that there was no corporate interest. I did not mean to say that. I am more concerned about the fact that we are at the point now where we disavow all who disagree with us. A lot of very powerful and positive things could come out of this and we really blind ourselves if we do not allow ourselves to hear them.

[Assisted Human Reproduction Act, May 21st, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I am sorry the member found my speech confusing, although it is a very complex topic. No, I did not say that I thought adult stem cell research was invalid or junk science by any stretch of the imagination. There are researchers working in that area. I did not make that case. If I was believed to have done so, I am sorry. That certainly was not my intention.

On the second question, I am will not respond to it. I can invent all sorts of hypotheticals also. The reality is there is a significant number of highly qualified researchers who say that there is value in embryonic stem cell research just as there are those who say that there is value in doing adult stem cell research.

The compromise that the study tried to reach was to say that we should not close the door. Let us not allow it. It is a controlled activity. We did not ban it outright the way we did on the chimera or the mixing of animal and plant genes. We said it was an area that we did not know and that it would evolve. Therefore we would create a process and a structure that would control and regulate it so that we could manage it, closing the door if necessary or opening the door if necessary. We still have a choice. For us not to leave ourselves the option of evaluating what is happening each step of the way in an area like this is just wrong.

There are two other important areas. The emotional side, the heat is in the use of embryonic stem cells because that is where we get right down to the question of life and the destruction of life for other purposes. It is a hugely important question.

There are other areas. One area that I think is not dealt with adequately in the bill is the fact that children are being produced. It started off with people wanting to have kids and were producing real, live children who are walking around and they are as citizens. Frankly, they have fewer rights today than any other children have and that needs to be corrected. It is not the hot, emotional topic that everyone wants to talk about in terms of stem cell research but it is a real issue and it is a service that needs to be sorted out.

Then there is the larger management of the system and clinics so that women receive consistent quality in the kinds of services that they provide. When we move into the use of new technologies or new techniques, we need a proper service for deciding which can and cannot. It is not just left to the sole discretion of the researcher. All three of those are very important.

[Assisted Human Reproduction Act, May 21st, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey starts with a scene of a bunch of prehumans, ape-like creatures, gathered around doing the various things they do. One of them, in a random act, grabs the femur of some animal, waves it around and eventually smashes another bone with it. He waves it more and smashes more and the next day in an attack uses it to club down somebody. The metaphor was the birth of the age of technology. What it did not show was that night around the campfire when those same groups were talking about what had happened and one of them said that if the creator had wanted us to have bones to hit people with he would have grown them out of the ends of our arms.

Thus in a sense the debate we are engaged in here was born. Throughout history there has been a constant debate between the capacity that science gives us and the ability of a society to absorb that capacity, to understand it, to come to terms with it and to figure out how it fits into the kind of life we want to lead.

I actually was not going to speak to the bill, but upon reflection and after listening to some of the debate today I thought it would be useful to reflect a bit on what occurred in the committee as we did the pre-study of the bill, because it was a really marvellous opportunity. It was a marvellous time.

In all the years I have been here I have not had a committee process that brought together into a struggle so many people from so many different positions. That is all I can say about it. People fought. They wrestled openly with the concerns they had. Those concerns got debated. We tried to figure out the tremendous promise that was inherent in the advancement of science in this area and the very real fears about what this does to us as a society. What happens if we start to truly treat life as a commodity that can be bought and sold or if we manufacture life for other purposes? These are the kinds of issues where I think this place is at its best when it truly struggles with them. I think the report that was produced was the best we were able to do to try to marry those conflicts.

I wrote a piece some years ago on how parliament could never make an optimal decision because what is optimal is in many ways dependent on one's point of view. We all come to the table with a particular position on something. Ultimately, throughout all of these processes, we pick the best fit, the best marriage of all the pressures, the concerns, the history and the diversity that exists in this country to make a decision that ultimately is not optimal from anybody's point of view but hopefully, in the best of times, is the most optimal decision for a society. I think we achieved that. I think we did something very special in that committee.

We also learned a lot. As someone who has worked with children for a good portion of my life, I learned a lot. I think it is important to step back to what got this started, which was the very real desire of people to have children. We heard images raised in some of the speeches about big farmers doing this and about a corporate agenda trying to achieve something else, but at the end of the day it was about people having difficulty conceiving, and they were searching desperately.

I was director of child welfare in Manitoba. I can tell hon. members about the numbers of people who are really trying very hard to have children, who want to have the kind of joy and satisfaction that I feel all the time with my kids. Science began to offer them some hope. It is not that long ago that the first in vitro fertilization took place. As well, we are also now doing a bill on the control of pesticides and there are actually concerns that some of the ways in which we burden our environment may contribute to the fact that people are having difficulty conceiving, to this rise in infertility. Also, the fact that people are waiting until later in life to have children is believed to be a big cause of it.

However, the reality was that a lot of very competent, caring Canadians were having trouble producing children. Some solutions were developed, not in a totally random way but by different people trying different things. Some doctors were more aggressive and we saw the rise of the clinics. A great deal of relatively unstructured activity took place at that time.

In a sense what rather surprised me was the randomness, because this was something that was driven by a couple wanting to have a child with all of the dialogue taking place between the couple and with the researcher and the doctor without any sort of social overview or any of the kinds of normal protections we might have in bringing forward a new medical service, to the point where, as we discovered in committee, there were children being produced who in some ways had none of the body of protections or supports and the family had none of the supports that we would offer to anybody adopting a child.

One of the very real issues was the ability to track parents. When I was first a director of child welfare in 1983, an adopted child could not track down his or her parents. Today open adoption is a commonly accepted practice and active adoption registries, where for certain reasons children can seek out their parents, are pretty much the norm. It is done for very real reasons. In this case, with the advancement of knowledge about genetics, knowing the genetic make-up of parents may be very helpful to people in the management of their own health.

Yet in regard to the issue we are dealing with today, we had a group of children being created and going into families but having none of those rights, those systems or that ability to track their parents. We found a sort of randomness in how the records were kept. Some were kept for a few years, but it was all at the discretion of the local physician.

There was a system that had grown. There were also concerns about the protection of the women, who were in effect the active guinea pigs for the advancement of this new technology and who were driven by their overwhelming desire to have children.

Then of course we had the concern that I would rate as the third order of business for the bill, which was the attempt to build a regulatory framework around the other services, the other activities that are enabled by the first ones, such as the availability of embryos so that research could actually be done on them. It was something that could not have been anticipated when all this started. We all see now the absolutely fantastic articles in the scientific journals and certainly in any tabloid. There was one article about combining spider genes with goats' milk in the hopes that the goats will produce a protein that produces spider silk, because of its wonderful strength. The idea of having goats spinning webs in my house does not thrill me, but it is hard for us to capture these things.

The ideas of combining the genes of animals and plants, as has been talked about with certain foods such as tomatoes, or combining genes of animals and humans to create other kinds of animals, now put very difficult, very frightening possibilities before us. Before now they did not exist and we did not have to worry about them because they could not happen, but today they are real.

On the other side of it, this research adds to our understanding of who and what we are and how we function in the hope that we can correct some of the very horrible conditions that afflict people. Hopefully we can correct some of the tremendous deformities and incapacities children are born with. Hopefully we can find the triggers to help quadriplegics regenerate nerves. There is a tremendous wealth of very exciting possibilities here.

Therefore, as society has had to do with each major advancement, we were called upon to try to figure out what was the optimal path for the group. I think we did a pretty good job.

I think we struck a balance in the committee report and what I see us doing now is a sort of drawing back and a re-fighting of the positions we fought through in that report. I think we need to reflect on what our collective goal was. There was not a surrender in the writing of that report. There was a consensus after a lot of struggle. We tried to strike a balance in regard to creating a commodity. We talked about fees, payment, for people who were acting as surrogates. The report recommended that there be no fee given. I argued that there should be, not that there should be a purchase price for a child, but if somebody's sister agrees to carry a child and take time off work to do so, that person should be able to compensate her. In the end it was decided to take a stronger line on that.

There were a number of issues like that. There were absolute bans and prohibitions on the cloning of human beings and on the creation of chimera, the mixture of animal and human genetic material. There was an absolute ban on it because we just could not imagine where that might go.

The debate about the benefit that may exist here, that sort of Holy Grail of being able to unlock some of these mysteries and actually make seriously injured people whole again, really led us to leave that door open, to leave a regulatory mechanism in there which would allow us to constantly make that decision because that decision needs to be made, remade and made again in the face of advancing knowledge. I think that was the right decision and the right approach to take and I think the bill captures the intention of the work we did. In some sections it does not use the same language. It does not go as far in some of the preambles as we would have gone, but I think it attempts to do that.

I also want to talk just briefly about what happened with CIHR, because when the Canadian Institutes of Health Research came out very quickly with its own guidelines I felt quite strongly that it was attempting to promote its position and to try to end run this process in advance of the House actually taking the time to act on this. I am here to say that I am very pleased with the actions of CIHR and its director since then. I think they have responded very appropriately by holding back. I really want to thank them for it and I congratulate them for being that sensitive to what has gone on.

There is another aspect to that. In attempting to deal with these very difficult and very sensitive subjects, we have tended to devalue expertise. It is easy to do that, to say that a researcher is just a clone of that particular drug company or that another researcher has some other motivation. The reality is that most of them are just researchers. They are just trying to figure out a new way of doing things. They are not driven by any other secret agenda or whatever. They are like all good researchers: they are in that quest for knowledge. We should listen to them. We should not disavow what they say. If we get ourselves to the point where we are driven only by emotion, then we are not respecting those who spend their time really trying to understand and bring some light to these topics. Then, I think, we do take ourselves back to the time of Galileo and forget to admit that the earth does revolve around the sun. There is a very real danger in this.

I think that where there is real discomfort is in that sense of commodification, that sense of making it really easy to have a child, almost to the point where one can pick the hair colour, the size and the intelligence quotient. There is that sense of almost being able to say that a certain kind of baby is wanted, but if it does not come out quite right we will toss out that one and get another one. I want to do everything we can to push back against that.

We know those forces exist. We see them in other countries with sex selection in children. We want to do everything we can to balance that, regulate it and push back against that trend. I argue educate on the other side of that because the only real change will come through broader education.

We have to be careful too that we do not shut the door on what could be some extremely important advancements in the health of ourselves, our children, our families and our nation.

[Immigration, April 30th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, last Sunday on the American television show 60 Minutes Canadians witnessed a demonstration of a fundamental difference that exists between Canadian and U.S. culture. It is not that our goals are different but that there is indeed a Canadian way, a Canadian approach to international relations, and a Canadian approach to ensuring our collective security.

We should reflect on the fact that not one of the 19 terrorists involved in the attacks on September 11 came from Canada. They were all legally resident in the U.S. having come through U.S. customs and immigration. In fact, it was Canada that six years ago pioneered the system of placing immigration control officers at airports abroad to prevent illegal immigrants from gaining access to this country. However in doing so we have not closed our borders. We have not become fortress Canada.

We recognize the responsibility of all civilized countries to be a haven to those who are victims of persecution and prejudice elsewhere. We remember that we are a nation of immigrants and we celebrate the strength that our diversity provides. 60 Minutes , by trying to understand Canada through its U.S. lens, failed miserably. Perhaps next time it will come to learn rather than judge. Canada can and should do more, but as always we will do it the Canadian way.

[Pest Control Products Act, April 15th, 2002]

Some of us have yet to come out of the fog.

[Curling, January 31st, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, once again I am forced to rise in the House to inform the House that yet another Canadian championship has been claimed by a Manitoba team. In this case it is the Canadian junior men's curling champions.

The team, composed of skip Dave Hamblin, third Ross Derksen, second Kevin Hamblin and lead Ross McCannell, curls out of the Pembina Curling Club in my riding of Winnipeg South and, incidentally, the riding also represented by the minister of family services of Manitoba who is in the gallery today.

They are going on, March 23 to 31, to Kelowna, B.C. to compete in the world championships, and I know all members of the House will want to join me in wishing them the very best in bringing home that title to Canada and to Manitoba.