Keith Martin

[Foreign Affairs, February 18th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, half the population in that country is dying. This is the same non-answer that the government has been giving for a year.

My question is simple. No one is coming to the defence of the innocent people of that country, who are dying in torture centres and who are being murdered. Half the population is being starved to death. It is that simple. This country is a member of the Commonwealth. Will the government stand up in the defence of these people's lives? Will it ask for the continued expulsion of Zimbabwe from the Commonwealth? Yes or no.

[Foreign Affairs, February 18th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the expulsion of Zimbabwe from the Commonwealth expires next month unless the suspension is renewed.

Given the fact that people are still being tortured and murdered by Mugabe's thugs, and that the economy and social structure of that country continues to be torn apart by Mugabe's actions, will the Minister of Foreign Affairs support the continued expulsion of Zimbabwe from the Commonwealth, yes or no?

[Canada Elections Act, February 17th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak today on Bill C-24, an act to amend the Canada Elections Act.

On the surface, it is a bill that professes to end influence peddling in Canada and I could support it, as could any member in the House. However, the fact of the matter is that this is not what the bill is about. The bill has some serious deficits of which the Canadian public should be well aware because it is their money that will be used to fund us as political parties, instead of in other ways.

The first aspect of the bill deals with corporate and individual donations to parties and candidates. The bill limits funding to political parties by corporations to $1,000 a year and by individuals to $10,000 a year. I do not have any problem with that at all. In fact, putting limits on individual and corporate donations is a good thing. But where does influence peddling take place? It takes place underneath the table. The big chunks of money that we find from organizations like Groupaction and others come in under the table and amount to the tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars that are given to political parties in Canada today. Therein lies the challenge.

Producing transparency in the manner in which individual corporations are able to provide moneys to political parties will remove the ability to have influence peddling. I would suggest that what the government could do is adopt what the European Union has done, and that is the “publish what you pay principle”. Not only would I say publish what you pay, I would say “publish what is received”. If we could do both of them, influence peddling would be severely limited in Canada. That is a good way to end it.

To register constituency associations and to put more transparencies in place are good parts of the bill, but where I have serious problems is in using public moneys to fund political parties, and really, if this part of the bill were removed I would stand up and support the government on its bill.

In our system today, after an election parties are refunded from the public coffers 22.5% of the amount of money that they have actually spent. In the bill the government proposes to increase that to 50%.

Second, the government also proposes to increase the tax credit from 50% to 75% of donations. When individual organizations like the Canadian Cancer Society, the Heart and Stroke Foundation and so many others are starving for money and indeed when there is more reliance placed on them to raise their own funds, would it not be right for the government to increase the amount of money that it allows individual charitable organizations, regardless of what they happen to be, so that they would have the same charitable deduction as political parties? Why not do that? That would be a very good and progressive move on the part of the government: to make individual charitable deductions the same whether one donates to a political party or to a charitable organization.

The other aspect that we take umbrage at is the annual allowance. What I think the Canadian public will find very interesting is that in the bill the government proposes to allow the taxpayer to give political parties $1.50 for every vote they have received in the last election, for every single year. Let us look at the facts in the last election. For the Liberal Party, that would mean $8 million every year. My party would receive $4.9 million and the Bloc Québécois $2 million per year of taxpayers' money. In total, almost $19.3 million of the taxpayers' money would be going to us as political parties every single year.

These days when there is so much competition for moneys for health care, defence and a whole host of issues that help the people of our country, surely the government would take it upon itself to say we should not be funding Canadian political parties with taxpayers' money. A better use of the people's money is to put it into health care so people can get their health care when they need it, or to put it into social programs for the poor and underprivileged when they need it, or into housing or aboriginal affairs, or a host of issues that affect the poorest of the poor, because $19.3 million of the taxpayers' money is nothing to sneeze at.

I would support the bill if the government removed the public financing of political parties and took it upon itself to be innovative. I would ask the Minister of National Revenue to please give charitable organizations the same tax write-off as would be given to political parties. It is the right thing to do.

On the issue of a vibrant democracy, it is sad to say that a justifiably cynical public is moving away from political structures and into alternative structures to try to get what they want. That has happened because there has been a defanging of the country's political institutions.

MPs cannot represent the public who sent them here in the manner in which they should be. We need the power to represent our constituents and to do what they want. It is sad that in 2003 that is not the case and as time passes, it is becoming worse. Politics has become a cynical game fuelled by the taxpayers' dollar. The problems of the nation are merely the backdrop upon which the game is played for the maintenance or acquisition of power. That has to change.

Whoever sits in the prime minister's seat and chooses to do this, chooses to democratize Canada, chooses to democratize this House, will have a legacy that will live far beyond that person's years. Whichever leader chooses to do that will have put something in the history books that he or she can be proud of and that will serve the Canadian people very well for years to come.

There are things such as empowering MPs and changing private members' business. The rules are crafted by this House, by your office, Mr. Speaker, to go into the standing orders. In the waning days of December before the winter break, the government chose to renege on its promise. It chose to end the hard work of changing private members' business, that small island of opportunity where MPs can innovate. It chose to kill it and it has gone back to the dark days of private members' business being a farce. That has to change.

With respect to committees, the public and others who have been involved in committees must sigh and shake their heads at how disappointing the experience has been. Committees could be a vibrant place where members from all parties could put forth their individual expertise to deal with issues and offer solutions to help the government to better our country.

Committees are basically a make work project for MPs. We study issues. We often study the studies and then we go back and study them again. Legislation is reviewed which is a good thing.

However, there is a dominance of the party in power. The parliamentary secretaries sit on the committees. The government controls the committees with an iron fist. The original intent of committees as a place where MPs could actually have a vibrant discourse with each other and come up with something good, productive and effective is absent.

Many committees do good work. Even when that good work is done, the committees put together documents that get a day of interest in the media and then they are tossed on a shelf to collect dust. I am sure that somewhere in Ottawa there is a large warehouse where those studies are collecting dust.

We do not need more studies. We need action. We are not lacking in solutions. We are lacking in the political will to implement solutions. We need to deal with issues. We need to put people to work, to shorten waiting lists, to give people health care when they need it, to clean our environment, to help aboriginal people, the most dispossessed people in our country. That is what we need to do. We do not need to root around for more solutions.

There are numerous people outside and inside the House with umpteen constructive solutions that only need to be applied. The government does not need to apply them on a national scale. If the ministers applied them as pilot projects, imagine what we would see. We would see success and sometimes we would see failure, but surely where there was success we could share it with people from coast to coast and adopt that for the betterment of all Canadians.

I close by saying that the government has a grand opportunity to reform our system to make it more transparent and to democratize the House for the betterment of all Canadians.

[Canada Elections Act, February 17th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, only one political party wants to eliminate publicly funded taxpayer contributions to political parties after an election. The only party to do that is the Canadian Alliance, and was the Reform Party.

What we are not in favour of is an uneven playing field. I would ask the member this. Will he support us when we get into power to remove publicly funded support of political parties?

[Canada Elections Act, February 17th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I think the public should be aware of what is going on here. There is a fundamental decision. What we are fundamentally opposed to is basically influence-peddling, the ability of deep pockets to be able to provide moneys and have influence on government and government actions. All of us are opposed to this, but the bill has nothing to do with that.

The bill is abhorrent because it would use public funds to pay political parties. These days, when there is not enough money for health care, for education and for the social programs upon which we rely, what is the government doing by diverting limited public funds to give to political parties? That is what this is about.

What we want to ensure is that there are good, tough rules to make sure that people like ourselves in public office, and indeed the bureaucracy, are not profiteering from our positions. Furthermore, the public should know that most of the big moneys given to the government happen under the table. Thank heavens we have limits on what we can spend on our elections, which is a good thing, but if we want to eliminate influence-peddling, let us make sure we have good oversight and transparency in what we are doing.

My question for the member is this. How can he possibly justify to the beleaguered Canadian taxpayers giving moneys to political parties in the amount of $1.50 for every single vote that they received in the last election, every single year?

[Zimbabwe, February 14th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, in Zimbabwe opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai is on trial in a kangaroo court for allegedly plotting to assassinate Robert Mugabe. This trial is an absolute farce. The testimony is based on a doctored tape made by Ari Ben-Menashe of Montreal, an individual wanted for fraud internationally.

The RCMP has investigated these allegations. The release of that investigation would exonerate this individual. If the release of the investigation does not take place, this individual will be executed by hanging in the very near future with widespread ramifications for the region.

The trial is a farce. Canada cannot sit idly by and let an innocent man die based on the testimony of a fraud artist. The government must ensure that the RCMP's findings are made public and submitted to the court in Harare.

The RCMP should also investigate Mr. Ben-Menashe, his associate Alexander Legault and their company Dickens and Madson for international fraud, trafficking of blood diamonds and other crimes.

[Endangered Species Sanctuaries Act, February 13th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I thank all members for contributing to this debate. I want to particularly thank my friends from the Progressive Conservative Party and the NDP for their comments.

At the end of the day this is about preserving endangered species that know no bounds, as my friend from the NDP said. Whether they are peregrine falcons, other types of birds, large and small mammals or even plants, they do not recognize or understand human, man-made boundaries.

Our country has a Gordian knot of jurisdictional problems that prevent critical habitat from being protected. Bill C-232 would undo that Gordian knot and enable us to do the right thing, to protect endangered species in Canada forever.

My friend from the Progressive Conservative Party illustrated the example of Isle Haute. Isle Haute demonstrates what the government can do and it did a good thing in that case. It was able to preserve that piece of land because it was under federal jurisdiction. Most land in our country where critical habitat needs to be preserved is not; it is in the jurisdiction of a combination of players, including the provinces and private landowners.

That is the point I am trying to make and it is the nub of the bill. The bill says that what should go beyond jurisdictional problems is the protection not just of any habitat but of critical, specific habitat for the preservation of critically endangered species.

My friend from the government mentioned about the minister preserving pieces of critical habitat. I do not think the minister should have sole jurisdiction for doing that. Ministers come and go. Governments come and go, but critical habitat remains with us. The designation of critical habitat cannot be at the whim of any government or any political party. It must be designated on the basis of pure scientific fact.

This is a critical problem. Some 7,000 to 8,000 species are at risk in Canada today. Those numbers are increasing geometrically as time passes. The single greatest cause is the loss of critical habitat.

As I mentioned before, a nexus of good must come out of this, a nexus of cooperation involving conservationists, developmentalists and government. They can and must work together because historically they have not. Developers have been focusing on economic issues. Policy makers and governments have been dealing with how to contain growth. Conservationists have focused on the costs and consequences of growth on nature and the environment.

What we have seen has not really been a debate but three different groups working, living and pursuing what should be common goals but in three separate silos. The loser is our habitat and our future. In sum, the public agenda that we have cannot be surrendered entirely to public institutions. Conservation opportunities cannot be constrained by the interstate system. Global civil societies can contribute more to the sustainable future if they come together in a more organized way.

The bill was not made votable. We are the only country in the world that allows its elected members to put forth bills but decides to make them non-votable and completely useless. Therefore, I seek the unanimous consent of the House to make Bill C-232 votable so that it can go to committee and get the intelligent assessment and analysis that would enable all of us across party lines to assess this bill, tear it apart and make it better for the benefit of all Canadians.

[Endangered Species Sanctuaries Act, February 13th, 2003]

moved that Bill C-232, an act respecting the creation of sanctuaries for endangered species of wildlife, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

Mr. Speaker, I am very grateful to my colleague from Dewdney—Alouette for seconding Bill C-232, regarding the creation of sanctuaries to protect endangered species.

In our country there are some 20,000 species, 8,000 of which are endangered and are becoming extinct. Historically the debate on endangered species has been marred in a great deal of difficulty and has gone around in a big circle. We have not really improved the situation and the facts bear it out.

As time passes the endangered species situation is becoming worse and worse. The rate of extinction on our planet is 100 to 1,000 times the normal rate of extinction that existed in times past. In the world some 240 hectares of land are destroyed every single hour. This is due to urban sprawl, agriculture and essentially the destruction of habitat.

Bill C-232 fills a number of loopholes in the government's bill on the environment. I will explain what they are.

The first flaw in the government's bill was in actually deciding what animals and what habitat were endangered in the first place. Currently those political decisions reside in the lap of the minister. My bill puts them in the hands of the scientists. Scientists on the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada would make the decisions. They would decide which species and which land would be designated as being in danger of extinction. It would be based on scientific designations.

The second aspect is very important. Habitat destruction is the single most important contributing factor in the destruction of species on our planet. My bill obligates the government to work with the provinces and private landowners to ensure that an agreement is reached. Where no agreement is reached, the government has the power to expropriate the minimum amount of land of critical habitat. My bill obligates the government to reimburse the private landowner for the loss of income from that particular habitat.

Usually an agreement can be arrived at. Many wonderful and innovative agreements have been put together, particularly in Saskatchewan where incredible work has been done.

Failing an agreement, the protection of the critical habitat for that species which is becoming extinct is foremost in my bill. My bill obligates the government to protect that habitat at all costs for the protection of the species.

When we look at the larger picture of endangered species and the massive destruction of endangered species around the world, we see that there are a number of factors. As I said before, the destruction of habitat is the most important factor. Second is the international trade and trafficking in endangered species.

Our country unfortunately is one of the leading contributors to the trafficking in endangered species. It is the third leading illegal product traded in the world, behind weapons and drugs. It is mostly driven by organized crime gangs and terrorist groups that generate funds from this illegal trade. The impact is massive. It is a multibillion dollar trade.

It is sad to say that Canada is one of the major conduits in the entire world of this trade. It affects not only our species, such as bears and other large and small mammals, plants and butterflies, but also it affects international species, such as the big cats, rhinos, birds, and many others.

Poaching is another major problem. There are penalties for poaching in our country but sad to say, those penalties are not applied to the maximum. The act of poaching is often not considered as being such a significant problem. It is not considered to be a significant crime.

The individuals who commit the poaching often do it in a commercial fashion and are responsible for the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of endangered species. Oftentimes the penalties that the individuals receive do not even meet the profits that they receive from one shipment of endangered species.

There is little application of the law and little disincentive to make individuals stop poaching. They know full well that the courts will not apply the maximum penalties. I would encourage the government at least to apply minimum penalties for that type of activity.

Also, we have to look at the resources for our conservation officers. The government has gutted the ability of our conservation officers to defend our country's wild spaces. It has removed their resources, it has cut their numbers and it also has disarmed them. Disarming our conservation officers, as my colleagues from Alberta know very well, is a very bad thing. We find out a number of things in the bush. Rarely, as a last resort, we may need a rifle or a sidearm to protect ourselves from an aggressive animal. Also, we may have to protect themselves from a far more dangerous creature, human beings. Poachers have guns. To have our conservation officers out there unarmed and vulnerable is something that the government must reverse very quickly, because it is putting our conservation officers' lives in danger, in my view.

CITES, the convention on the international trade in endangered species, is a wonderful piece of international legislation that works to protect endangered species. The sad part of it is that our country has not lived up to our fundamental obligations under this convention, even though we have signed it as the centrepiece of the international protection of endangered species.

We also have to close the major loophole called reservations. Reservations under CITES enable a country to say it is backing out of the convention because it feels it has a right to consume the most endangered species in the world, a unilateral decision. Japan, for example, has taken itself out of CITES for a number of the most endangered species, some whales and sea turtles. The Japanese consume them at great expense to the environment and the species. It is outrageous that more than 20,000 endangered sea turtles are killed every year just to meet the consumption market in Japan.

We have spoken about pollution many times. It is a major threat in our seas, in our oceans and on our land. If there is one thing the government can do, not only for the health of endangered species but for the health of humans, it is to deal with the pollution problems in our water, air and land. All are a contributing negative factor, not only for non-human species but also for humans. It has a massive impact upon the health of all of us.

Over-exploitation is another problem. I live in British Columbia. Over-exploitation of our fisheries on the west coast has had a devastating effect on salmonid species and others that live in our oceans. This was done as a miscalculation and through a lack of attention to what our fisheries officers have been telling the government for years. The government is not applying good scientific principles to the establishment of proper quotas for harvesting fish species in a sustainable fashion. It is not being done, at great expense to our communities in British Columbia and no doubt to those on the east coast too. The government needs to change that.

We also need to look at the notion of free trade. Free trade can in fact help our endangered species, and I will tell the House how: by reducing the subsidies on fisheries and agriculture. Right now in the world $22 billion is spent on subsidies on fish. What that leads to is overharvesting of our fish species all over the world, leading to a downward pressure and the extinction of many fish species internationally.

What I would like to do now is articulate a new model for conservation, which I gave to the government some six years ago. I hope the government will take it up because it will serve as the missing link between conservation and development.

Historically, the conservationists and developmentalists have actually taken parallel paths that have often worked at odds with each other. We certainly saw that in Johannesburg at the post-Rio summit, the earth summit that took place last year. What has happened is that conservationists have ignored developmentalists at their expense, and people involved in development have ignored conservationists at their expense. The two have to be dealt with mutually, particularly in areas of the world where lack of conservation is decimating some of the most important international critical habitats. I am talking about the developing world.

In South Africa, that missing link has actually been found. I will explain how it happened. Through conservation, funds can be generated. Those funds have to be divided between conservation and primary development in rural areas for health, education and job creation. When people who live near a critical habitat derive an economic and personal benefit from that habitat, what they see is an incentive to preserve and protect that critical habitat. This is the crux of the matter. Unless human beings can actually derive a direct benefit from the conservation of a particular habitat and site, unless they derive that personal benefit, that area will be destroyed. It is happening all over the world.

However, if we can create a system whereby human beings, particularly those in these areas, can generate a financial benefit, it works. I will give some examples. In KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, they have done this very well. The people there actually said many years ago in the late 1800s that many critical species, such as the white rhino, were becoming extinct because of the decimation and destruction of their habitat. They said that they had to protect that area and they did, but they also recognized that the people around the area had to benefit from it because population pressures would be such that they would have overrun the area, regardless of what central governments chose to do. They did that with great success.

Right now the World Wildlife Fund recognizes that. Historically it has not. It took the historical conservationist approach, which is to say we must preserve this particular area for the sake of it being preserved, ignoring the human needs in the surrounding area. In so doing, it ignored the human needs at the peril of conserving that particular area.

I ask the government to do the following, and I say that it can actually do this. It can, through our official development and assistance programs, through CIDA, work not only with other countries but indeed with our own conservation groups here at home, bringing together the NGOs and provincial and federal governments to say that conservation sites must be there to generate funds which can and must benefit the surrounding people. Also, it will provide the opportunity to generate funds for our conservationists themselves, for our hard working conservation officers who have an acute lack of funding to help themselves.

One area that could do it but is controversial is the notion of trophy hunting. I myself am not a hunter, other than with a camera, and I cannot imagine killing anything. However, it is a fact that when there is an excess number of species too much pressure is applied on a habitat and the species themselves are harmed.

What can be done is to designate a certain number of those species to be hunted, with a very large sum of money being charged. Those monies, however, have to be poured into the conservation system for conservationists and for conservation in that area. If that is done, the monies are generated for research and development into conservation, indeed, for the protection of that particular area and for the expansion of other critical habitat.

We know, regardless of where we are in Canada and indeed abroad, that the lack of resources is one of the biggest obstacles to funding conservation projects. With central governments having large competing interests for health care, education and other needs, conservation is often dropped to the bottom of the list in terms of the expenditure priorities of a central government. This, however, cannot continue, or should I say this will continue but it can be reversed by giving our conservationists the tools to do the job. The tools to do the job can come if we are able to generate the funds from those areas.

In closing, I will say that untouched wild spaces are becoming extinct. Pressure on critical habitat is the single greatest cause of the destruction of these critical habitats. They will be lost forever. Is it a fait accompli? Absolutely not. My bill will be able to provide the government with the ability to close loopholes that will enable our government and our country to protect our wild species and our endangered species forever. It will also show the world that there can be a working together among conservationists, the private sector, the federal government, the provincial governments and NGOs for the betterment of our society.

If we do not do this, we will continue to lose species and biodiversity, which will affect us in countless ways in the future, ways that we cannot hope to understand at this point in time, but ways that will no doubt affect us adversely forever.

[Black History Month, February 11th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, in commemorating Black History Month, we in the Canadian Alliance would like to pay tribute to the enormous contributions of black people in Canada, people like Lincoln Alexander, Canada's first black MP, cabinet minister and Lieutenant-Governor, and the current member for Etobicoke--Lakeshore, our first female black MP. These people and their families often endured much in racism and obstacles to fulfill their dreams. Their road was steeper than ours.

Let Black History Month be not only a tribute but a challenge: a challenge to stamp out racism and discrimination against anyone and ensure that people are judged on the basis of merit, not on the colour of their skin, and a challenge to act in the defence and protection of people abroad, especially in Africa, where people are dying from conflict, AIDS, starvation, and a host of other man-made and preventable problems. More than 50 million will die on that continent alone in the near future.

We in the Canadian Alliance salute the black people in Canada and challenge all of us to come to the help of the underprivileged and oppressed everywhere.

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

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to Bill C-13 and the amendments in Group No. 6. I compliment the government for bringing this bill forward. It has many laudable goals such as the banning of human cloning. I want to deal with a few other issues that perhaps muddy the waters on this sensitive topic, such as the issue of choice, abortion, and the definition of human life. In my view, and I am speaking personally, some things muddy the waters on this extremely sensitive issue.

Make no mistake about it, much of the opposition to investigations into embryonic stem cell research comes from individuals who are completely entitled to have the view that an embryo is a human life. They must be respected for their view. That issue has to be removed from this subject. We are dealing with the potential to do investigations, to do research that will save people's lives.

It is very easy for those of us who are healthy, who do not have multiple sclerosis, who are not suffering from Parkinson's disease, who do not have cancer, to say we should not be doing research based on a certain moral viewpoint that people are entitled to have and should be respected for having. We cannot apply a moral decision, a moral choice on the issue of the definition of human life and apply that to the ability for us to prevent researchers from doing critical research into lifesaving procedures that hopefully will provide the cures for those scourges that kill millions of Canadians every year.

Having seen many people die from many of those illnesses, I cannot help but be somebody who strongly supports research using adult stem cells and embryonic stem cells. I am not opposed to defining the regulations under which that could be done. Many individuals across the country who have respect for the material we are dealing with have put forth eloquent suggestions, as have members of my party, which can be respected and introduced. However, we cannot allow moral viewpoints, moral definitions and moral arguments to impede what I would consider to be a hard moral argument and that is the protection of people who are living today, the saving of their lives.

We should put ourselves in the shoes of somebody whose wife, husband or child is dying of cancer. If that research into embryonic stem cells provided the solution, the cure, we would have a very hard time saying no to embryonic stem cell research.

It is true that adult stem cell research has made leaps and bounds in the applications that exist but there is absolutely nothing that can take the place of the information that we will have on differentiation of cells, communication between cells, how cells migrate through the body and indeed from that, learn important lessons in how we can cure and prevent cancer. Absolutely nothing takes the place of that. It would be a huge mistake for us to invoke any kind of ban on embryonic stem cell research.

Motion No. 94 talks about animal-human clones. I completely understand and support the notion of banning animal genes being introduced into the human genome. No one knows where that could lead but it could lead to enormous biological and medical problems later on. What about the reverse? What about the introduction of human genes into animals? Are we going to ban that? I would suggest not, for the following reason.

In our country today, 170-plus people die every year from a lack of organs for transplant. That number will increase as our population ages, as the incidence of diabetes increases and the damage to people's kidneys and other organs increases. The number of people who will require kidney transplants will actually increase over the years. Indeed it will be an explosion is numbers that normal cadaveric transplants, transplants from humans, will not be able to meet. The need for organs exceeds the number of organs that are available today.

There has been incredible research into introducing human genes into certain animals, for example pigs, to provide heart valves and organs for transplanting into humans to save lives. That research must continue. It is exceedingly important. That research enables us to produce organs that would not be rejected by individuals. Lifesaving organs truly could be the gift of life. It would be an enormous mistake to ban that type of research.

Then there is the issue of assisted reproductive technology and surrogacy. A lady who was in her forties wrote a very eloquent paper on the fact that she was not able to have children of her own. She paid money to a relative to be the surrogate.

The bill indicates that only payment for expenses should be allowed. A woman who undergoes surrogacy gives up more than nine months of her life. She undergoes pain and suffering and experiences a lack of work and is simply recompensed for the expenses. A person should not be criminalized for actually getting paid something more for the time and the pain and suffering involved in producing a baby for another. That should not be banned. That should be a decision between the people involved, the surrogate and the person or persons who are asking that woman to give up part of her life to have a child on their behalf. To criminalize that would be a huge mistake.

The penalties in the bill are $500,000 or up to 10 years in jail. Mr. Reyat, who is responsible for murdering nearly 300 people, just got five years in jail and could be out on parole in 18 months. Why should we criminalize somebody who wants to be a surrogate and potentially put the person in jail for up to 10 years? That is a huge mistake.

Furthermore, the issue of donor anonymity is too much of a hammer and should be dealt with. I understand the purpose is so the child will know the medical history. It is a completely reasonable and worthy endeavour. However, forcing the donor not to be anonymous would greatly shrink the number of individuals who would be donors. All those couples who cannot have children would not have the opportunity to have children in the future. This is a very serious problem.

The way to deal with it is to ensure that every donor would be anonymous but the medical records would be available to the child. In that way the mother and the child would know the pertinent medical history while ensuring that anonymity continued. That would not dry up the individuals who donate their time, their efforts and their sperm or ova so that others can have children.

It might be easy for those of us who can have children to completely ban this type of activity, but there are those people who cannot have children. For some of them, adoption, which is so difficult in our country, is not an option because of finances or simply because there are not enough children available. It would be inhumane for us to use such a big hammer and prevent them from having children.

There is so much more to talk about on this exceedingly sensitive bill. I understand completely those who take a moral and ethical viewpoint on it with respect to those who are against abortion and those who are pro choice, but let us remove that from the bill. Let us not forget that respect for the individuals who are born is exceedingly important but so too is the respect for those who donate their time and their lives to ensure that others can have children.

This is a sensitive issue which must be dealt with sensitively. Banning human cloning is good, but we should not stand in the way of legitimate medical research that will pave the way in the future for those cures that will save many other lives.