James Lunney

[Justice, February 14th, 2003]

It is working hard in the wrong direction, Mr. Speaker.

This week, Air India bomber, Inderjit Singh Reyat, was awarded a five year sentence. He is eligible for parole in 10 months. For the death of 329 people, he will serve time in a federal facility equipped with a billiard table, tennis court, jogging path and a golf course, which the Solicitor General says is not a club fed.

It has taken 18 years to bring this murderer to justice. Is it any wonder Canadians have lost confidence in the justice system?

When will the government ensure that criminals face serious consequences for serious crimes?

[Assisted Human Reproduction Act, February 11th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, it has been an interesting process working through this very important bill. Bill C-13 is entitled an act respecting human reproduction and related research.

The scope of the bill is very broad and relates not only to in vitro fertilization and assisted reproduction. The intent of the bill is to help people, couples who are having trouble because of infertility to have the families they want. It is because of that the health committee, in doing its work on the bill, entitled the study “Building Families”, which is the focus.

There are many controversial aspects of the bill. Part of it is the related research that spins off as a consequence of the in vitro process. The bill contemplates allowing so-called surplus embryos or left over embryos--frankly, even the terminology is offensive to consider--to be used for research purposes.

The bill discusses important issues which we have yet to debate. The amendments in Group No. 2 will be coming up later, and deal with anonymous donations for example and surrogacy. Donations of gametes and issues like that are also covered in the bill.

The subject today largely deals with some of the regulatory aspects. There are 11 amendments in Group No. 6, among them Motion No. 92 brought forward by the member for Mississauga South. These amendments deal with the regulatory body, the governor in council, how regulations shall be set up and some of the responsibilities of the Minister of Health.

Motion No. 92 brought forward by the member for Mississauga South has a number of subclauses. It deals with the equivalency agreements with the provinces. Various provinces may wish to develop their own bills. The province of Quebec already has some regulatory measures in effect concerning reproductive technology, and other provinces may have some also. The clause deals with equivalency agreements with other provinces. The member has very astutely observed that it is quite a loose arrangement in terms of equivalency and the amendment would tighten up the responsibilities. It specifies what an equivalency agreement would look like and the responsibilities that would come with making such changes.

The hon. member has brought in amendments which are quite reasonable. Motion No. 92 states in part:

Equivalency and enforcement agreements shall be subject to the following safeguards:

(a) the Minister shall be accountable to Parliament for all equivalency and enforcement agreements;

That is a very important clause. Ultimately, what is the purpose of our going through this exercise as a federal institution to develop a law for Canadians if someone is not responsible and accountable to the legislators who put the bill in effect in the first place? The motion further states:

(b) the public shall be actively consulted on draft agreements before they are finalized;

The members of the committee who worked on the bill put a lot of work and effort into it. We heard from Canadians across the country. The committee received the bill in draft form and went to great lengths to tighten up this very important area.

We are dealing with human life. Children will be produced from this technology, children who will want to know about their identity later in life. We are dealing with some very profound emotional and moral issues relating to this research. The minister needs to be responsible and accountable and the public needs to be consulted. The motion further states:

(c) the draft agreements, together with the comments made by the public, shall be tabled in both Houses of Parliament for comments and recommendations;

There are a few other accountability measures mentioned in Motion No. 92. An important one is item (g):

(g) five years after this section comes into force, and at the end of each subsequent period of five years, a committee of the House of Commons, of the Senate or of both Houses of Parliament is to be designated or established for the purpose of reviewing this Act.

That is a very reasonable thing to do. This area of science is expanding at an amazing rate. The possibilities that come out of reproductive technologies are profound and have great scientific and health implications but also great moral implications. It is a very important motion. I hope all members of the House will give it due consideration and will vote appropriately. We certainly will be supporting this amendment.

Motion No. 94 also moved by the member for Mississauga South addresses a very important issue. It deals with the issue of transgenics or so-called chimera. A lot of Canadians are probably wondering what that is all about.

We wrestled with this issue at committee. We might wonder about this and I have raised this question repeatedly. There is a tremendous and resplendent array of genetic material available to us as human beings with some six billion of us on the planet. If we look around, a tremendous variety can be found within the human genome, from the little ones among us to the great tall ones who play basketball for great sums of money, from the ones of us who are a little slow to the ones who are really fast in terms of athletic prowess and ability.

I had the pleasure this week to watch an accomplished pianist at a concert. It was amazing to see that woman sit at the piano and play without looking at a note on a musical score. She could play this tremendous array of music from memory. I watched her hands fly across those keys.

It is amazing what human beings are able to accomplish. All that tremendous ability is available to us within our human genome. I have a hard time relating to why we need to mix animal and human genes. What would we hope to accomplish by putting a gene from a lower life form into a human cell or by mixing cell parts from animals and humans or by mixing genes from animals and humans? The bill allows for this under a licence.

The amendment would change it so that the regulations relating to chimera and transgenics could not be changed by the governor in council or by the minister. That is a very important amendment. If we are going to go this way at all, it needs to be tightened up so that this area is very significantly supervised and regulated.

Motions Nos. 96, 98 and 99 are procedural amendments which we would support. They are tidy-up amendments and we certainly agree with them and support them.

Motion No. 93 is an important amendment. It would delete clause 65 entirely, removing the power of the governor in council to make regulations for carrying into effect the purposes of the bill. Clause 65(bb) would allow the governor in council to exempt controlled activities from the provisions of the act.

There are important reasons that controlled activities in the bill require licences and that violations are subject to prosecution. It is because they involve the creation and manipulation of human life. Cabinet should not be able to simply overrule these regulations in a closed cabinet meeting. We certainly support the motion and feel it is very important.

Turning to Motion No. 103, clause 71 deals with transitional provision and grandfathered activities. This is a very important motion. It would delete lines 5 to 12 on page 35. This, as I said, has to do with the grandfathered activities. An agency that had done an activity as little as once would be allowed to do it if it had done it in the period preceding the adoption of the regulations.

The regulations could take some two years to come into effect. There is another motion coming forward, Motion No. 106, which is related to this that would require 90 days as a limit for grandfathered activities to be accomplished.

I hope all members will give these motions serious consideration and we certainly support the amendments brought forward.

[Petitions, February 10th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I have two petitions to present today. The first petition is from the area of Nanaimo largely and I imagine has 10 pages of signatures. The petition has to do with Bill C-415 originally, now known as Bill C-250.

The petitioners would like to draw the attention of the House to sexual orientation being added to the list of identifiable groups in the hate propaganda section of the Criminal Code of Canada. They would like Parliament to take note that the legislation does not define hatred. Public expression and moral disapproval of a sexual practice should not be judged as promoting hatred.

They are concerned that such an addition could frustrate fundamental freedoms to practise religion and could even make sections of the Bible considered hate literature if that were to be approved.

The second petition is from the ocean side communities of Nanaimo--Alberni riding and is similarly drawing to the attention of the House that the addition of sexual orientation as an explicitly protected category under Sections 318 and 319 of the Criminal Code would lead to individuals being unable to exercise their religious freedoms as protected under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The petitioners therefore call upon Parliament to protect the rights of Canadians to share their religious beliefs without fear of prosecution.

[Health, February 7th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the former minister of justice launched a gun registry that has ballooned to a billion dollar fiasco. As health minister, another pet project involved a $6 million marijuana grow-op in the depths of a mine in Flin Flon, Manitoba.

It has been two years since the pot was planted. Information suggests that there have been two crops and hundreds of pounds of pot produced. Apparently the first crop, at least, was unusable for research.

Canadians would like to know what has been done with the pot from the “rock garden” and how is this joint venture benefiting Canadians?

[Question No. 62, January 31st, 2003]

For the fiscal years 1993/94, 1994/95, 1995/96, 1996/97, 1997/98, 1998/99, 1999/2000 and 2000/2001, from all departments and agencies of the government, including crown corporations and quasi/non-governmental agencies funded by the government, and not including research and student-related grants and loans, what is the list of grants, loans, contributions and contracts awarded in the constituency of Vancouver South—Burnaby, including the name and address of the recipient, whether or not it was competitively awarded, the date, the amount and the type of funding, and if repayable, whether or not it has been repaid?

Return tabled.

[Assisted Human Reproduction Act, January 30th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the debate on Bill C-13 has been going for a while now. We are currently debating the Group No. 5 amendments to the bill. The Group No. 5 amendments largely deal with clause 40 in the bill, which deals with the functioning of the regulatory agency.

I appreciate the remarks that other members have contributed to the debate already today, including the member from Calgary who just spoke. However I want to first go back to one intervention related to the Group No. 4 amendments since the minister herself stood just a few moments ago and addressed an issue related to an amendment that would strike section 26, clause 8, regarding the conflict of interest code.

I agree with the member from Winnipeg North who spoke just a few minutes ago on this matter. The committee took this quite seriously. The minister implied that subclause 9 of clause 26 is adequate for determining who is and who is not eligible to serve on this agency.

As a committee, we did not feel that the conflict of interest regulations were tight enough. For that reason the committee, after a lot of intense debate, included a clause that would restrict members of a board from having any pecuniary or proprietary interest in any business which operated in the industries related to reproductive technology. That was for a very specific reason. We felt this provision was necessary and that members should not support the striking of that clause.

Going on to the Group No. 5 amendments, these amendments deal largely with the regulatory agency, as I have alluded. The bulk of these amendments, beginning with Motion No. 80 up to and including Motion No. 90, deal with various aspects of the use of embryos for research.

In our minority report, the Canadian Alliance put forward the position that we would prefer a position that would make all these motions unnecessary, and that relates to the use for which cells will be used. We feel, as Canadian, we are dealing with this at a time when more information is available to us than other jurisdictions. Therefore it is incumbent upon us to make decisions that may be different from other jurisdictions that have gone before us, when scientific information on the alternatives to embryonic stem cell use were not as clear as they are today.

I want to underscore some of the reasons why we feel that it is wrong. The bill states that it is wrong to create embryos, in fact, it is forbidden to create embryos for research but what is happening as a consequence of the bill is precisely that.

I want to speak for a moment about adult stem cells because the committee heard abundant evidence, and there is abundant scientific evidence today. I will to quote from some of the top scientists who spoke to committee in just a moment . Briefly I want to say that adult stem cells are a safe, proven alternative to embryonic stem cells. Sources of adult stem cells are umbilical cord blood, skin tissue, bone tissue, and I will talk a about that in a moment. Adult stem cells are easily accessible, are not subject to immune rejection and pose minimal ethical concerns, as opposed to embryonic stem cell transplants that are subject to immune rejection because they are foreign tissues. The body has cells that check licence plates, it checks the DNA and it checks out the markers on the other cells. Cells from another body will be rejected until one takes anti-rejection drugs.

Adult cells today are being used in the treatment of Parkinson's, leukemia, multiple sclerosis and other conditions, but embryonic stem cells have not been successfully used in the treatment of anything.

I make reference to some of the distinguished scientists who spoke at health committee.

Dr. Alan Bernstein, President of the CIHR, the Canadian Institute for Health Research, stated at committee November 26, 2002:

I would say that if one knew that adult cells would work in therapeutic settings... then there's no question that this would be the preferred route of treatment, as opposed to using embryonic stem cells, where one doesn't know about the transplant rejection situations and all that.

I thank Dr. Bernstein for that. Clearly adult cells are better. However there is the “if” word there.

Dr. Ronald Worton, who is the head of the Stem Cell Network at the University of Ottawa, “There is no question that autologous stem cells hold a lot of promise”. Those cells are taken from one's own body and put back into one's own body. He went on to say, “We believe a lot of the therapy that will be done with stem cells in the future will be done with adult stem cells”.

Dr. Prentice, University of Indiana, testified that he took stem cells that were isolated from his own blood for research purposes. Because these stem cells are smaller, they can be centrifuged and separated from other cells and can be used to grow in vitro and in Petri dishes.

I ran into a person in the city of Toronto just a short time ago, who is related to a person who is a very well known Canadian. I will not mention his name because I have no permission to do so. This man had a condition called multiple myeloma. That is a very serious bone cancer. Bone marrow cells had been extracted from him, then they isolated the stem cells. He had been given chemotherapy to kill the tumours in his bone. Then after the tumours had been killed with the chemo, his own stem cells were reintroduced, and he is doing just fine without medication.

Thursday, November 28, Dr. Freda Miller, now of Sick Children's Hospital in Toronto, spoke on the prospects for profit of adult stem cells. Dr. Miller was formerly from McGill University. She made a lot of headlines for her skin based precursors, cells which she isolated from the skin that were able to transform into stem cells and grow into other types of tissue. When the headlines on Dr. Miller's research hit the paper they said that researchers had found gold.

About the prospects for profit in adult stem cells, she said that they were very low. As a matter of fact, she said that she did not think that any company would fund the kind of dream scenario we were talking about, autologous transplantation for individuals.

Dr. Worton is saying that there is tremendous potential in autologous transplant, but Dr. Miller is saying there is not much money in autologous transplant. That will have to be funded by the public system, health charities or something as a purely medical treatment because there is not any money to be made.

The concern we have is that this important area of research should not be driven by money or by where profits are highest. The corollary is that there is a lot of interest from industry in promoting embryonic cells because if we can get it to work, it will have strings attached to it that may be patentable. Maybe the cells are patentable. Maybe the procedures are patentable to get something that is not a good fit to fit. We feel that this important area of research should not be driven by what will be most profitable for industry. It should be driven by what is most profitable for Canadians.

We have had petition after petition in the House from Canadians from all ridings. I have heard members opposite present petitions from their ridings asking Canadians to pursue adult stem cell research and make morally ethical research available to Canadians, the ones that show the most promise. That is the position of this party. I wish the members opposite would take this seriously so that we can advance what is in the best interest of Canadians. This is good science. It is not bad science or moral people trying to hold back good science. This is good science that would be better advanced by promoting adult stem cell research.

If we were to go that way, if we would follow the advice of minority report from the Canadian Alliance, these amendments would not be necessary. However the minister seems determined to keep the door open to use embryos, embryos that were intended to produce children. That was the whole focus of our draft legislation, building families, and the committee was determined to try to keep the focus on building families.

I applaud the member for Mississauga South who has brought in amendments that would require the agency to at least, if we are to go this way and use the most vulnerable people, the ones trying to produce babies, to encourage them to give up the surplus embryos to industry. At least this would require the agency to keep track of those embryos, to be accountable for them and to put requirements on the agency to monitor the use of these embryos and to try to restrict the commodification. We applaud the member for Mississauga South for his effort in bringing forth these amendments and I hope all members of the House will support them.

[Dr. Garnet Reynolds, January 30th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, on January 28 British Columbia lost one of its finest citizens and a great Canadian. Dr. Garnet Reynolds served the community of Port Alberni for over 50 years.

First and foremost, he served his patients through his chiropractic practice, but he also served 12 years as city alderman, as chairman of the Harbour Commission, and had 30 years of perfect attendance at his Rotary Club. He was an active member of St. Alban's Anglican Church and a Sunday school teacher. An executive member of the Royal Canadian Legion, he was often MC of Remembrance Day services.

Dr. Reynolds served Canada in the King's Own Calgary Tank Regiment. He took part in the raid on Dieppe in 1942. He served as a tank commander in the Sicilian and Italian campaigns.

As one of the first graduates of the Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College in Toronto in 1950, Garnet became a leader in his profession. He served on the board of the CMCC as well as the B.C. and Canadian Chiropractic Associations.

Garnet and Mildred were blessed with sons Larry, Terry and Leslie, and daughter Rhonda.

Awarded Young Citizen of the Year in 1954, recipient of the Queen's Golden Jubilee Medal in 2002, a life of exemplary service, he was one extraordinary Canadian.

[Assisted Human Reproduction Act, January 28th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, it has been an interesting day so far but, my goodness, I have to protest the confusion related to these amendments. We started this morning with 107 proposed amendments. We were not allowed to see them until the very first thing this morning. Then the Speaker ruled a bunch of them out of order and so on. Then they were grouped and regrouped. Frankly, for members to debate intelligently on some of these amendments, it takes a bit of time to read and understand what is the intent of each amendment. Surely there has to be a better way of conducting business in the House rather than leaving members to scramble, as we have had to.

Having said that, we are now involved in debate on what was Group No. 3 of these amendments which now has been renamed Group No. 4, and indeed there are some important amendments to be considered here. The majority of them deal with the regulatory agency.

For those just tuning in to this debate, Bill C-13 is the bill relating to reproductive technology. It is a very broad bill and contains a lot of areas of concern to Canadians, such as the cloning of human beings, which most Canadians agree is not a way they want to go, therapeutic cloning, chimera and the importing and exporting of human gametes.

When we talk about chimera, what on earth do we mean by that? We are talking about the mixing of human and animal reproductive materials or the mixing of human and animal genes. We might ask why anybody would want to go there.

There are a lot of very important issues related to this bill. The Raelians are now claiming to have cloned I think three or four human beings. One wonders where on earth they are going with this. Obviously most Canadians are concerned about this and we want to see appropriate legislation brought in to prevent this kind of thing happening, but we also want to ensure that we get the legislation right.

With Canada dealing with this matter later than other nations, we have the opportunity to do it right. We have information that other nations did not have and the obligation is on us to ensure we use that information to create the best law to protect Canadians and to ensure that the offspring of this reproductive technology are the focus and not just a consequence of the act.

One of the first amendments in the renamed Group No. 4 is Motion No. 55 brought forward by the member for Mississauga South. The motion deals with the forms that the regulatory agency shall use. It also deals with detailed information. I will quote part of it. Subclause (2) of the motion reads:

The information referred to in subsection (1) shall specifically include

(a) details on the option to give embryos up for adoption; and

(b) the facts related to what percentage of embryos donated for embryonic stem cell research are likely to produce stem cell lines that would meet the research quality requirements.

This raises the question of embryonic stem cells and how these will be used in research. The motion raises one of the fundamental concerns that many of us on committee had, which I want to address briefly.

The purpose of this bill is to help people who have failed reproduction and have gone through the agonizing ordeal of trying to produce the family they want so desperately. Many of us are concerned that we are asking people who are most vulnerable, because of their desire to produce a family, to also be the ones to make a decision on the so-called surplus embryos or embryos that have been conceived from their bodies and intended to produce children. They are asked to be produced or donate the spare embryos for research purposes.

Although the bill purports to say that we shall not create embryos for research, I am concerned that there is an incentive for industry to do exactly that, to create surplus embryos so they can be used for research purposes.

Although the bill says that we shall not do research on embryos over 14 days old is to forget that those cells were destined to become a human being. Some researchers have said that when we kill an embryo to extract the stem cells and then use those cells they will have a measure of immortality because they can be frozen and cells drawn out of them could be used repeatedly for research purposes,

Today we have options available to us. We know that adult cells taken from our own bodies have the potential to produce the cures many people with serious illnesses are looking for. We can tap into those either from our own bodies or in cases where that is not possible from umbilical cord cells for example.

I am concerned that the bill would put the most vulnerable people, those desperately trying to produce children, in the position of having to release their intended offspring for research purposes. If we were to make informed decisions in the House based on the scientific information available we could avoid putting them in that position.

Motion No. 64 talks about risk factors associated with infertility. This amendment was debated in committee and states:

“the professions respecting assisted human reproduction and other matters to which this Act applies, and their regulation under this Act, and respecting risk factors associated with infertility;”

We feel it would be incumbent upon the agency that would be created to inform Canadians of the risks associated with infertility and that should not be forgotten. This agency, like a good doctor, should be trying to work itself out of business by creating a healthy patient that does not need its services. Risk factors associated with infertility should be a focus for this agency and they should be articulated. This agency should be advancing public knowledge on how to avoid infertility in the first place.

My colleague from Calgary who spoke earlier addressed Motion No. 71. This motion would delete a motion put in at committee specifying the gender of members qualified to serve on committee. I agree with his comments that this is inappropriate. Members should be selected for this committee based on merit and not on their gender or ethnicity et cetera.

My colleague from Calgary and the member for Ancaster--Dundas--Flamborough--Aldershot rightly addressed the issue dealing with conflict of interest in Motion No. 72. The committee was quite concerned about this agency. It felt this agency should not be composed of people related to the industry itself, but rather people from society who have demonstrated an ability to deal with complex issues and who are not necessarily from the industry. The last thing the committee wanted was a club of people with vested interests in the industry to be the ones regulating it and reporting back to the minister and not to Parliament on such important issues to Canadians, and issues that have such profound ethical implications.

Subclause 26(8) that the minister wants to strike says:

No member of the board of directors shall, directly or indirectly, as owner, shareholder, director, officer, partner or otherwise, have any pecuniary or proprietary interest in any business which operates in industries whose products or services are used in the reproductive technologies regulated or controlled by this Act.

That was debated in committee. It is important for Canadians that we do not have a conflict of interest set up by people serving on this regulatory agency with the powers it would have. I am puzzled why the minister wants to take that subclause out. We wonder where she is going with that. I am pleased to hear that members on the other side of the House agree with us that this is not acceptable. We also feel that this agency should report to Parliament not just to the minister.

We also note in this section that the minister would be able to change regulations without reporting to Parliament and make recommendations to the agency.

Therefore we have this relationship between agency and minister and minister and agency where changes to regulations could take place without consulting Parliament, and therefore without even consulting Canadians who might be concerned about the implications of such decisions.

I hope that members will consider seriously that there are amendments here that should be rejected and there are others that should be supported. I hope members will think beyond perhaps what the whip tells them to do and take these matters seriously.

[Assisted Human Reproduction Act, January 28th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, Bill C-13 is the subject of our debate this morning. The title of the bill is an act respecting assisted human reproductive technologies and related research. One of the first amendments we will be considering in this block today is about the very title, and we will be addressing that momentarily.

This bill has been a long time coming and Canadians have certainly been interested in the debate. If we go back historically, as we heard the member from Winnipeg earlier describe, interest in this area goes back at least 10 years to the Royal Commission on Reproductive Technologies. It travelled the country, studied the issue indepth and made some widespread and strong recommendations that regulations be brought in to control and regulate this area of assisted human reproduction because of the epidemic of many couples who were having trouble conceiving and naturally having their own children. This involves rather invasive procedures to help a woman who is infertile to ovulate and produce ova that can then be fertilized and reintroduced or by a variety of reproductive technologies help a family to have a child.

When the health committee took the draft legislation from the minister, it was heralded as a real breakthrough for democracy. Rather than receiving legislation and then coming to committee to try to change and alter it, the minister of health of the day referred in draft form the legislative package, the ideals of the government in terms of which way this legislation should go, and left it to committee to consult Canadians and come up with recommendations on how we should proceed. I was pleased to serve on that health committee, and we did indeed hear from many Canadians. We heard from scientists, interest groups and infertile couples.

The bill covers a wide range of subjects and I will talk about them briefly. It is a very complex subject and it is very wide in its scope. We are talking about issues such as surrogacy. We are talking about the import and export of gametes. We are talking about the related research that comes out of this, such as words like the member for Mississauga South just used, chimera, words that are not commonly used on the street in Canada and that even many members of the House likely would find confusing. On committee we spent a lot of time discussing the ramifications, the parameters and what the language really meant. There are very complex issues associated with the bill.

Our committee titled its report on the draft legislation, “Building Families”. We wanted to ensure that the focus of this technology was about helping people who were having difficulty, because of reproductive failures, to build the families for which they so longed. That I think was the focus that we hoped all members would retain. Somehow we feel that we have gone a little off track in some areas of the bill on that ground. If the focus is building healthy families, we want ensure that all aspects of the bill drive in that direction.

The bill also deals with related research. One of the very important spinoffs that comes out of this is the issue of embryos for research, the promise of stem cells for the potential for healing and the tremendous breakthrough. Although it has taken 10 years to get us to this point, perhaps one of the benefits that comes from that lengthy delay is that we have had access to information on the stem cell debate that other jurisdictions and other countries that considered this before us did not have.

We now have today information about the tremendous potential within our own bodies to harvest cells that can offer the cures that were promised from embryos but without the complications, not only morally but scientifically and clinically, that come from taking cells from embryos which require the necessity for anti-rejection drugs. As well we have the moral dilemma of using embryos that were intended to become human beings for other purposes such as research and the implications that has. We hope to address that further in a later block on this issue.

There are many challenging issues associated with this research. Another issue of course in “Building Families” is the children, keeping the focus on the children who would be produced from these technologies and whether we would adopt in Canada an open system or a closed system of donation. Nations before us have gone away from a closed system of anonymous donors which has created real problems for the children produced from the technology. We hope to address that in more detail as we get further into this debate on other blocks of amendments.

The issue of whether we pay surrogates or how we would reimburse people who help another person deliver a child is also a very challenging. The committee wanted to ensure that this was not turned into a commodification exercise, one that turned into another industry with great dollars and people choosing it as a career using their bodies to produce children for other people. We wanted to keep it altruistic and an initiative to help people, not one for profit or vulnerable to being exploited for commercial purposes.

In this block of amendments one important issue which has come up is the fourth amendment by the member for Saskatoon—Wanuskewin. It has to do with the preamble. It is a very important issue. I will read subsection (e) at the top of page 2 which was added at committee. It said that the purpose of it was to help people with failed reproduction to have healthy children. The following words were added at committee, that:

persons who seek to undergo assisted reproduction procedures must not be discriminated against, including on the basis of their sexual orientation or marital status;

I believe the member has raised a very valid issue in bringing forth a motion to delete these words because they take the bill in a direction that was not intended from the beginning. The bill is intended to help those with failed reproductive challenges, not those who have healthy reproductive system but who look for a way to circumvent nature and have a child another way. I feel that is not the intent of the bill and therefore we support the motion. We hope all members will support it and keep the bill on track for the purposes for which it was intended.

Very sensitive issues will come up on the importing of gametes. We have to ask why we would import sperm from other countries such as the United States. We do not know from where it comes. Health Canada purports to certify it is safe but we have heard evidence that we are importing sperm from U.S. prisons. That shocked most members on committee and I believe it would shock most Canadians. If we are trying to ensure a healthy, wholesome effort to help people with tragic circumstances, why would we allow anonymous donations from other countries that we cannot possibly control or regulate except to examine the product and try to determine whether we can detect something wrong with it. We feel we have no shortage of reproductive material in Canada. There are 33 million of us. We have the resources among us. We should not be importing sperm from other countries.

There are many items like this in the bill that need to be debated and Canadians need to be engaged. I am disappointed that the amendments I brought forth at committee on this subject, and in fact amendments we brought forth to be discussed at report stage, have been disallowed by the chair. It seems the government is determined to keep this current system in place with the flaws and risks that leave Canadian women exposed to the import of gametes from other countries. That is a disappointment.

We will be discussing more of these issues as we get further into the debate and I hope that all members will take these matters seriously.

[Airline Security, December 13th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, prudent is hardly the word for the way the government spends its money. The government has wasted a billion dollars on the gun registry. It has spent millions on advertising contracts for its Liberal friends and over $100 million on Challenger jets it did not need.

With all this extra money floating around, can the government explain why security measures were not paid for out of existing revenues?