EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Tuesday, October 8, 1996

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[English]

The Chairman: Let's resume our round table discussion number three. This time we plunge into the ethics of biotechnology, an aspect that was raised before the committee in not as strong and central a manner as some of us would have liked. So we would like today to catch up in a way and get some views on record.

As you know, the ethical aspect is important in examining the role of biotechnology. Of course the corollary question is whether ethical considerations can be included in a regulatory system. I would like to hope they can, although it may not be easy. Let's hear some views on that aspect as well.

Another question that was partially discussed, if I remember correctly, is whether it is appropriate and acceptable in ethical and moral terms to transfer genes between different kinds of organisms that otherwise could not exchange genetic material. It's a rather intriguing question.

On the hierarchy of concerns, the question was whether it can be argued that it may be acceptable to modify the genetic make-up of micro-organisms in plants, for example, but less acceptable to modify the genetics of higher animals, particularly by the transfer of human genes.

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Then there is the difficult question of the advantages and disadvantages of patenting life forms. The ethics of the ownership of life forms is an important one. There is the question of biotechnology and sustainable development, which we may find time to address this afternoon.

We would like to cover possibly all these areas. Without further delay, I would therefore ask that we go around the table to introduce each other and then have a good exchange. We'll start with the clerk, please.

The Clerk of the Committee: I'm Norm Radford. I'm the clerk of the committee.

Mr. Ted Schrecker (Associate Director, Environmental Ethics, Westminster Institute for Ethics and Human Values): I'm Ted Schrecker from the Westminster Institute for Ethics and Human Values in London, Ontario.

Mr. Steckle (Huron - Bruce): I'm Paul Steckle, a member of Parliament from Huron - Bruce riding.

Mr. Knutson (Elgin - Norfolk): My name is Gar Knutson. I'm a member of Parliament for the riding of Elgin - Norfolk. That's on Lake Erie. I'm a member of the environment committee.

Ms Joy Morrow (Industrial Biotechnology Association of Canada Ethics Committee on Intellectual Property Rights): I'm an intellectual property lawyer and represent the Industrial Biotechnology Association of Canada.

Mrs. Jennings (Mission - Coquitlam): I'm Daphne Jennings. I'm a member of Parliament for Mission - Coquitlam, British Columbia, and I also sit on the environment committee.

[Translation]

Mr. Asselin (Charlevoix): My name is Gérard Asselin. I represent the riding of Charlevoix and I'm a member of the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development.

[English]

Mr. Brewster Kneen (Author): I'm Brewster Kneen from Mission, British Columbia. I'm the author and publisher of a monthly newsletter on food and agriculture.

Ms Joyce Groote (Executive Director, Food Biotechnology Communications Network): I'm Joyce Groote, the executive director of the Food Biotechnology Centre. I'm here to represent diversity of membership - academia, government, industry, interest groups, health professionals. I'd like to be able to share some of my experiences in actually holding forums dealing with the issue of ethics.

Mr. Taylor (The Battlefords - Meadow Lake): My name is Len Taylor. I'm a New Democrat member of Parliament from Saskatchewan, and an associate member of this committee and the agriculture committee.

Mr. Jim Fischer (Dairy Farmer and Physiologist): My name is Jim Fischer. I'm the vice-chair of AGCARE, Agricultural Groups Concerned about Resources in the Environment. I live about two hours north west of Toronto. My wife and I have a 250-acre, 70-cow dairy operation.

Mrs. Payne (St. John's West): I'm Jean Payne, a member of Parliament for St. John's, Newfoundland. I'm vice-chair of this committee, and if I don't ask any questions, it's because I'm hear to listen.

Dr. Margaret Somerville (Gale Professor of Law, McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law): I'm Margaret Somerville, associated with the faculty of law and the faculty of medicine at McGill University and the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law.

Dr. David Waltner-Toews (Department of Population Medicine, Ontario Veterinary College, University of Guelph): I'm David Waltner-Toews, professor of veterinary epidemiology at the University of Guelph.

Mr. Paul Brassard (Catholic Rural Ministry Coordinator): I'm Paul Brassard. I'm with the Catholic Rural Ministry, based in Regina, Saskatchewan.

Mr. Tom Curran (Committee Researcher): My name is Tom Curran. I'm with the research branch of the Library of Parliament, and I'm the researcher attached to this committee.

The Chairman: I'm Charles Caccia. I'm the member of Parliament for Davenport, Toronto.

As we did this morning, let's have many crisp, possibly short, interventions. Let's see if we can start with the ethical aspect and proceed from there. Is there anyone who would like to make the initial intervention on this topic? Does it need to be prepared? Who would like to launch some ethical considerations?

Mr. Kneen.

Mr. Kneen: The more I think about the question, the simpler the answer becomes. Any consideration of biotechnology is going to be ethical in its very beginnings, because ethics is about the quality of relationships with others. It can have a wide range. It can be between human beings, or between ourselves and the world around us. It's about the quality of the relationships - and certainly biotechnology influences those - or it's about the alteration of those. Therefore you have ethics in at the very ground floor.

The Chairman: Why do you stop there, leaving us hanging in suspended animation? Would you like to complete your thoughts?

Mr. Kneen: The question raised is that ethics includes socio-economic and cultural elements, and I think that's indeed true. When we begin, particularly in the area of regulation or even discussing the subject itself, we have to raise questions about interventions and the quality of those interventions.

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To move it to another level, I would suggest that the character of biotechnology as practised, and I'm using it in a broad sense, meaning genetic engineering, where it's more pointed, and I think biotechnology is also an expression of our particular tradition of science... I don't want to say that it's distinct completely, but it seems to me the two characteristics of biotechnology, or genetic engineering in particular, that raise a great many questions are its... It is goal-oriented. The practice in biotech is that the proponent proposes a goal and then sets about to engineer that goal. That brings about a whole approach of intervention, which I increasingly tend to view as inherently violent, and consequently it raises profound ethical questions that we used to think were of not of much significance.

A few days ago I happened to be at the World Dairy Expo in Wisconsin looking at a display of some technology that had to do with embryo sexing and splitting. This company was designing this for on-farm use, so you could extract the embryos, sex and split them on the spot, and then freeze them. Watching the video of the splitting of an embryo, I couldn't help but be struck. It was a blow-up of what you would see in the process. That could have been the egg of a human being. It really didn't matter. It sort of said there's no line. What we would like to think of as applying the new ethics between people - if there isn't a line at that level, how can we distinguish between animals and the way we treat animals?

So I'm being forced to go back and review a lot of the things we've taken for granted. Are they ethically acceptable practices? If we have certain norms at this end and there's no arbitrary barrier, then we have to broaden our thinking about ethics very considerably. I think this flies in the face of our whole cultural tradition of domination of nature, and we're beginning to have serious questions about whether we know enough to exercise this kind of technological control. Are we morally capable of doing that, or is this a question of false pride where we know more than we think we do? I think it came up earlier that we may have to question just how much wisdom we actually have and the consequences of initiating things that may go far beyond even our imagination at this point. So I think when we talk about ethics, it's the whole thing.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Kneen.

We now have Ted Schrecker, Margaret Somerville and David Waltner-Toews.

Mr. Schrecker: Thank you very much. I think you've given us about three days' worth of fuel for discussion.

I'd like to pick up on one point. It seems to me that we're revisiting this morning's discussion of whether genetic engineering is special and whether the products of genetic engineering and the capabilities it gives us are in some way special. That's certainly one of several issues that we need to keep discussing. It's not going to be resolved around this table today, but it's vitally important that debate take place.

The Chairman: It is taking place this afternoon.

Mr. Schrecker: That's all I have for now.

The Chairman: Margaret Somerville, please.

Dr. Somerville: I'd like to pick up on a point Mr. Kneen made. He said that ethics is about relationships. That's one aspect of ethics and one particular school of ethics. When I read the document that was sent to us prior to this meeting, one of the things that from my background I thought was necessary was to structure the discussion about ethics. Ethics is not just about feeling good or even doing what you think is right according to your personal conscience. Ethics is a discipline, and you can go about finding out what the different ethical perspectives are. Your answers are not always straightforward, but the ways you can go about doing it can be relatively structured, and I would suggest that you do need a structured approach to these questions that you're asking here.

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For instance, I would add to your ethics of relationship many other schools of ethics, which are like lenses through which you can view the problem that you put in the middle. If all of those schools give you the same answer, you don't have an ethical dilemma. You know what the ethics are. Usually what happens in a pluralistic society is that different values will be thrown up as needing priority by different schools. We often belong to different schools.

My second, sort of preliminary point picks up on what Dr. Schrecker said about it being very important whether there's a fundamental difference here between what we're doing with biotechnology and what we've done in the past.

Language is not neutral. Language fashions the way we feel about things. Moral intuitions are very important to ethics. For instance, I just noticed in the documents that Ms Press-Merkur said that what was involved in recombinant DNA was that the species barrier was broken. It resonated with the idea of breaking the sound barrier or going out into space. That's one image that's extremely powerful and tells you that we're doing something very different.

Compare that with Mr. Meyers, who said that we mix thousands of genes from two plants or animals when those animals or plants reproduce. Here what we're doing is mixing only one or two specific genes, and that's not necessarily a radical step, because in terms of DNA there's more similarity between the species than differences. Very different organisms have large amounts of DNA in common.

Rather than as he was advocating, saying that this is a very small step to take, just mixing a couple of different genes, I would suggest that the fact that we have so much DNA in common and yet we are so different - we're either a plant or an animal or a different species of animal - shows how immensely important those small changes are, and therefore how immensely important it is to take what we're doing very seriously in making changes by choice instead of by chance. I'd suggest that change by choice is of a different moral order than change by chance. That's the fundamental difference between what we're doing now and what happened in the past.

The Chairman: Thank you. We would be very grateful if you identified the values that ought to be taken into account in approaching the matter of biotechnology and public interest. We need to know what would be the guiding values in our society.

David Waltner-Toews.

Dr. Waltner-Toews: I'd like to follow up on a couple of points. As Margaret was mentioning, one is breaking the sound barrier or the species barrier. I think that is important. I'll come to that in a minute.

The change between the breeding processes we've used for the last few decades and the biotechnological mixing of genes is like going from cars and trucks to airplanes. One can argue that it's a just a small step from moving transport on the ground to transport in the air, but in fact it creates a whole new set of problems.

The benefits and the costs, from my point of view, operate on different time scales. The people who would bear the costs of the actions we take now are not the same people as those who would reap the benefits. It seems to me that creates some ethical problems, because the people and animals that would bear the costs are not at this table, and probably could not be because we're talking a generation from now.

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If you speed up the rate of change in an agricultural system such that the social and cultural institutions and ecological structure cannot evolve along with it, you can set yourself up for a major catastrophe. In terms of agriculture, we've had breeding practices and agricultural practices have evolved along with those, gone from natural breeding to using artificial insemination. There's been a gradual evolution of institutions around that. It seems to me we're speeding it up considerably more now, and the consequences will be down the road.

When I, for instance, look at a parallel field, that of food-borne diseases, which I work with, if we look at things like mad cow disease, hamburger disease, salmonella in salads, cryptosporidia in our water supply, those things are happening now because economic policies 10 or 15 years ago influenced the structure of our agricultural institutions in certain ways and created opportunities for bacterial populations and parasitic populations that were not there before.

Biotechnological changes in food in terms of preservation, in terms of what we are capable of then doing in terms of distributing them, changes the opportunities for bacterial populations, microbial populations, in ways that are only partly predictable.

So we're speeding things up, and it seems to me that in a natural system the purpose, if one can talk about purpose... Functionally species and the lack of crossing across species barriers tends to cluster genes in such a way that it puts brakes, if you want, on evolution. Not everything is possible. Not all possible mixing of genes is possible.

There are some breaks in the system. So you have a lot of innovation in terms of genetic mutations but you also have certain checks and balances there. It seems to me that if one can look at human socio-economic systems in the same way, the role of entrepreneurs is to innovate, create new things. That's wonderful, but it seems to me the role of good government is to create a series of checks and balances to hold these things in check so that our cultural and social institutions evolve around them in ways we are happy with. It seems to me that this is where the bigger ethical questions for me tend to come out.

The Chairman: Thank you. Gar Knutson.

Mr. Knutson: Thank you very much. I want to take a minute and share with the group the evidence we've heard. We've been looking at this for a couple of months, so I'll try to do a one-minute synopsis.

On the one hand we have the industrialists, who say, in regard to government, that Canada can't be left behind; it has to stay competitive with the rest of the world or we risk losing out on a huge leap forward in terms of our standard of living and general prosperity, as well as great advances in terms of medicine and the tremendous potential in genetic engineering.

On the other hand, we have industry that says there are lots of jobs and lots of prosperity that comes with that and really we don't want a regulatory framework that's too burdensome. Everyone agrees that safety has to come first. There are general health concerns and environmental concerns, but by all means don't overburden us with too much regulation.

There seems to be a real consensus that they don't want a special gene act. They pretty much like the regulatory regime that's in place now. Whether they go through Agriculture Canada or through Health Canada, they don't want a pooling of experts into a particular department that deals with genetic transfer.

Then we have the scientists, the majority of whom - I don't think it's unfair to say, from the evidence I've heard - seem to be saying this is not a quantum leap. We get the theme of the quote Professor Somerville read on an ongoing basis. Last week we had somebody from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, a scientist who said of all the environmental concerns there's too much concern over biotechnology or genetic engineering and not enough concern over climate change, just by way of example.

I'm trying to sort this out as a parliamentarian or as a potential lawmaker. The question I'd like to propose or ask people to take is you can talk about the ethics, but at some point in the day that's translated into what laws should we have in place. I'll just throw that out.

The Chairman: Ms Somerville and Mr. Brossard.

Dr. Somerville: In response to this question, I think the first question we have to ask - and it's a very unfashionable question, almost politically incorrect - is whether gene transfer is inherently wrong. If we say no, not in itself as a technology, then we have to ask if there are there any examples of it that would be inherently wrong.

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One of the ones for which a lot of people have very big misgivings - there's been legislation to prohibit it and there's proposed legislation for Canada to prohibit it - is human-animal hybrids, for instance. However, I suppose there would be some exceptions to that, because if we were going to use animal organs for transplant to humans, there is some work going on where they are putting human complement factor into pigs, for instance, to get pig hearts that might be less readily rejected by human transplant recipients.

I suppose what we have to do then is to say how do we move on deciding what's right and what's wrong if not everything is right and not everything is wrong. That would be my own personal position. I think some things probably are inherently wrong, and where we are going to disagree is where we draw the line between those that we accept and those we don't.

What's important is that as a society - not just as individuals, not just as scientists, not just as industry, not just from an economic point of view, but as a whole society - recognizing that what we say about this, and especially in our most important secular cathedral, our Parliament, sets what's called the societal paradigm... That's the shared story we all buy into that tells us what we think of ourselves, what we think of human identity, what we think of other people and what we think it means to be a member of Canadian society.

These are very big questions when you realize that this is what they will have a major impact on, not simply whether we can make some better drugs, which is very important, or some food that doesn't deteriorate so quickly, or some money in the process, or some economic advantage for Canada. All of those are important, but that's why these things raise such deep ethical issues. They go to the very basis of the nature of human identity and how we relate to others, how we pass on our genes, and whether we hold - and I use this in a secular sense - sacred the gene pool, for instance, the human gene pool, that we've never been able to tamper with before. We're the first generation that's ever had the opportunity to do that, and I certainly think we should not rush into doing it. That isn't to say we shouldn't do it, but I think we need the sort of consideration we're having.

The Chairman: Thank You. Mr. Brassard.

Mr. Brassard: I wanted to let people know I did make a couple of copies of some of the ethical considerations I've done. I've left some with the clerk.

I'm speaking from the perspective of a province where biotechnology is going full steam ahead. They tell me the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon is probably the fourth or fifth largest or most advanced university in terms of biotechnology - not only the university but that whole industry there. The problem is we don't have a clue about what is going on there. It is really quiet. Above all that, we now have the mouthpiece of the ag-biotech industry who is now the Deputy Minister of Agriculture. It becomes a real problem, because in our view there is no balance.

I was looking at some of the questions, and it reminds me a little bit of asking a person if they shoot right or left when actually the game is football. What concerns us is we think the key questions become those of control, of direction, and of accountability. How will society deal with very powerful conglomerates that have the power to patent and sell the genes of food, of health and of energy? How will society truly benefit from the life science revolution that is being managed and directed from the top down by corporate boards of directors?

What we're seeing now is we have industry, government, and at least some universities all on the same side. We don't have that balance universities used to provide. I'm happy to hear that obviously some universities are taking that role, but from our perspective, to us the university has to be because we need people who are debating who have the same competence.

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I'm not a scientist. I'm not an engineer. I'm coming from the people on the ground who are going to be dealing with the consequences of these things.

For example, the trend in plant patenting for us is in some cases morally unacceptable and fundamentally inequitable. What's happening is a single corporation can set the terms and the conditions for access to processes for manipulating plants as well as the plants themselves. That's a bit scary. In a general sense, that gives a perspective of where we're coming from, but the one of control is paramount.

The Chairman: We will have Mr. Lincoln next, followed by Ms Groote, please.

Mr. Lincoln (Lachine - Lac-Saint-Louis): Mr. Chairman, what Mr. Brassard said rings a bell with me, because I made the point this morning. I'm in the same boat as he is. We are asked to legislate, to regulate in matters that have become so fast evolving, so complex, that truly we're lost. We need intermediaries to assess them for us, to give us some opinions.

It's not the safe, easy world of yesterday, where we had to regulate whether we build a better road or whether we put traffic lights at the corner of the highway, as you brought up this morning. It's become so fast evolving, so complex, that ethical questions are mixed up to a significant degree. It's very hard to arrive at a clear opinion on these subjects before you look at the legislation and regulations.

We're talking about ethics and ethical considerations. Ethical considerations are more and more open to broad discussion. They are subjective. I would like to hear from the panellists who are experts in both the evolution of science and ethics on how they see the role of the legislator, the controller, you might say, of regulations and laws. Should it be a tightly controlled society? Should it be a more open society, where we let the checks and balances find their own way? Should we almost protect lay people who are completely lost in this world and who don't quite know how they should get their safeguards?

I was wondering if some of the scientific people here who also deal with ethics could give us their views.

The Chairman: Joyce Groote may perhaps be able to answer that question.

Ms Groote: Actually, I wanted to address something Margaret Somerville brought up on trying to come to grips with societal ethics versus individual ethics. After having tried to work through this issue by running various forums, it is really difficult when you're looking at societal ethics.

It was clear we could come up with some things we agreed with, but it was at a very broad level. It was dealing with things such as environmental safety and health and safety for humans and animals. Certainly accountability and control were parts of those, but as soon as we started to look at individual ethics it started to break down, because the question started to become: whose ethics?

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We really couldn't come to any consensus when we were looking at the individual ethics. There were conversations with various government departments, and there was another forum within the whole community. In fact, there are some people here who were at that forum.

The bottom line is that we can't make some of those decisions for individual consumers. They need to make their own decisions, and the only way they can do that is through information, so they can become more informed. They start to become more aware of what the issues are and what they need to look at. That's not saying the debate is really important.

That leads into my second point on the issue of control and accountability. It's interesting that corporations are often looked at as being those who are in control, and they must have the accountability. Interestingly enough, it's the community at large that has in fact made a tremendous commitment to providing information to the consumer, because it is the consumer who will actually have the ultimate control on whether they buy these products or not.

The Chairman: In that case, you're again diffusing the issue and bringing it to an individual choice. Is that your conclusion?

Ms Groote: No, there are some societal ethics. We all agree there are some very basic important issues. In fact, many of the government representatives looked at government as being responsible for setting standards in the legal system, based on society's ethics and their standards. But those values change. We need to be aware of what they are from time to time.

So when we're even looking at setting up regulations for let's say food safety, it's based on an ethical standard that we'll have safe food in our society. But when it comes down to individual decisions in terms of what products one might want to buy, I would suggest the consumer is ultimately going to have to make those decisions. If it isn't the consumer, then who does have the right to make that decision?

When speaking with some of my colleagues back in the old days when I worked for the government, many people felt very uncomfortable about making decisions for society as a whole. They felt it was much more responsible to make decisions based on safety, and then let people make their own decisions. Of course the decisions needed to be informed decisions, and they needed to provide the information so in fact people could be informed.

The Chairman: Thank you. Joy Morrow, please.

Ms Morrow: I don't know if I meet Mr. Lincoln's standards or not. I haven't officially studied ethics, but I have been a scientist for a number of years, both in research and in teaching. I then became a lawyer and have worked in intellectual property law, patenting and trademarks for the last 15 or 20 years. Of course we have to consider ethical issues in our business.

I'd like to touch on a few points that were raised by Mr. Brassard. I know he has some very legitimate concerns, and perhaps I'll be able to reassure him on a number of points.

These issues evolve over time. They don't occur overnight. The changes in technology occur over time. And the counterside to that, the response by people, changes over time.

We're never going to settle on an ethical standard today that is going to maintain a position as being good for all time. Obviously it has to keep on being investigated and looked at to make sure it meets the needs of society in years to come. Our values have changed from time to time. We can all look back and recognize we had different values about the family, for instance, in the 1950s than we do today. This doesn't mean our society today is worse or better. It just means that values change, and this is one area where values are going to change.

So there is no one right answer, in my opinion. We can shoot for the best answer we can today, but we have to keep our ears to the ground and our eyes open, looking for ways to modify the answer over the years to come.

The second thing I'd like to mention is that the technologies can appear frightening in the beginning for someone who has no scientific background in this area. Basically, they aren't any more frightening than other new technologies that have developed over the years - fibre-optic cables, laser beams, and TV sets - that have all become part and parcel of our everyday life.

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I'm sure you'll all remember that from time to time there have been disputes over whether television sets were safe, or whether they were producing emissions that were going to harm our children who sat too close to them and watched them.

So these issues are not unique to biotechnology. That's really the message I'm trying to get across. They're not unique to biotechnology, and we shouldn't make biotechnology have to meet some kind of unique standard as a result.

I think the big point is that communication is essential.

Mr. Brassard, you mentioned your specific example in the west. In particular, one deputy minister, who has now gone into the government, used to head an organization that was a communications organization.

To my way of thinking, his organization, AG-West Biotech, was an excellent example, and continues to be an excellent example, of an organization that is communicating - at a level that everyone who's interested can understand - the issues that are going on in biotechnology, and how they affect all of us, day in and day out.

I think those are publications we should all be reading and asking questions about.

The third point I wanted to make really follows up on what Miss Groote has already said. I jotted it down before she started speaking, so I'll just be very brief.

Whose ethics are we talking about? There's a number of different perceptions among all Canadians, and we're never going to agree on a single ethical code that suits everybody. Obviously we'd like to try to find a point of view most Canadians are comfortable with and that we think reflects the values we hold in this country. But I don't think we're ever going to be successful in satisfying every single person, and I don't think we should try to do that. That's a no-win situation.

In my view, the government should do its very best to ensure that the products are safe - all products, not just products created using biotechnological means, but all products. Then after that, as Mr. Groote has said, the consumer will vote with their feet, if they are interested in purchasing this product or using it, or if they're not.

Thank you.

The Chairman: Thank you.

We now have Mr. Schrecker.

Mr. Schrecker: A lot of people have said things I agree with, so I'll concentrate on the ones I don't agree with, because it's more fun that way.

First, it seems to me that the claim that consumers will ultimately decide, may hold water with respect to the products of agricultural biotechnology. It's simply wrong with respect to a whole range of other issues in biotechnology and elsewhere. The consumer, for example, is not going to decide - and indeed cannot decide - on the risks associated with field trials of genetically modified plants or micro-organisms that aren't yet in commercial use.

My second point is that the claim that the technologies of genetic engineering are no more frightening than other technologies we've come to know and love is, first of all, not one a large number of Canadians would apparently agree with. Furthermore, as Bill Leiss pointed out this morning, there are some good reasons for them not to agree with that.

To continue with the example of television, and to be just a bit provocative, the sets are probably safe to sit near - as far as we know now - but the institution of television has also destroyed the quality of political discourse in North America. And I think that's an effect some of us would have wanted to avoid, if at all possible.

That leads to the question of a unique standard for biotechnology. Should biotechnology be held to a uniquely high standard of safety or social utility? Probably not. Should it be held to a distinctive standard, in the sense that we ask questions about biotechnology and its effects on the society that we don't ask about the new generation of hard drives or fuel injection systems? Probably yes, although we could debate that at considerable length.

Finally, it seems to me that Mr. Brassard's point about competence is a critically important one, and it's not restricted to biotechnology.

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What we've seen in this society is an unprecedented expansion of the ways in which highly complicated scientific and technological research is affecting our everyday lives in a multitude of ways, some of them direct, some of them indirect.

The possibility that genetic diagnosis will pretty soon enable a government agency that wants to to impose a surcharge on you if you choose to have children once you've been identified as predisposed to a certain medical condition is a case in point. The insurance companies south of the border are doing this just as fast as they can get away with it.

At the same time, we've witnessed a dramatic decrease in the ability of legislators to get a handle on these issues and on the ability of the public to gain access to information that is not rightly or wrongly associated with the pursuit of a particular vested interest.

I think your comment about the universities is very well taken. The universities have to take their share of the blame, but so do governments themselves. The Science Council, for example, has been disbanded and the foresight capability it brought to debates like this has gone. The Law Reform Commission, with the foresight capability it brought particularly to debates in the area of biomedical ethics and law, has been disbanded, and so on and so forth.

The Chairman: Thank you. Jim Fischer, please.

Mr. Fischer: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I'd like to go over a few things from some of the responses I've heard. So I'm going to bounce around a little bit.

Right at the very beginning, we heard Mr. Kneen speak about how he felt biotechnology significantly influences ethics. I would concur. It certainly likely will, as have a number of other technologies in the past. I can only relate on experiences I've had on our farm or through my father or through my granddad with regard to this particular comment.

I can recall my granddad saying how he was ostracized when he began having his cows artificially inseminated, how they would have two heads or horns or everything else that people had said. All I can say is thank goodness we had that. I'm sure the people might have been ethically challenged when that new technology came into being. But if we didn't have that technology, as well as many others on our dairy farm, I would suggest in the 19 years my wife and I have been farming, we'd be milking maybe two-thirds as many cows, with more land base and less production. That's just one example.

We have this in many technologies. Biotechnology is not different, in my mind. I will admit I believe the genetic engineering aspect is fundamentally different, but I do not have a problem with that.

The second point is - and this is Dr. Waltner-Toews' - that I concur with you that, yes, we are speeding things up with respect to these kinds of technologies. I would argue maybe we're not going fast enough in some of these as well. I know you're likely shaking your head on that one.

Why I say that is, again getting back to our herd on our farm, that I can relate to that. We've been selectively breeding for specific traits for our animals for a number of years to do what I just described a minute ago, in terms of production or whatever, as my father has before him.

So it has taken three generations of people with that herd - mind you, the herd has grown - and perhaps nine to ten or maybe twelve cow generations to get where we are today, to try to find a specific trait to improve the legs and feet so the animal lives longer and healthier and produces more. I have no trouble with this. That's what we want.

If through genetic engineering we can find a way through gene transfer of allowing me not to have to administer a vaccine - you can relate with this very well, I'm sure - or not to have to administer a specific antibiotic to maintain or enhance their health and do that very rapidly, I would be all for that. I would suggest the farming community would be for it as well. I cannot fathom why not.

Dr. Somerville mentioned the question: Is gene transfer ethically wrong? I would suggest not at all. You mentioned the pig heart as an organ transplant and that your're transferring a human piece of genetic material. I would give you the example that if my son or if your sibling was a burn victim and needed that protective covering from the pig as a result of a transfer of some genetic material into that pig, thank goodness for that, I'm all for it. And when I'm saying that, I can't see how there can be a line between the medicinal aspects and the food aspects with regard to society's ethics, which, as was mentioned a few moments ago, are all over the map. Society, as Dr. Morrow and Ms Groote mentioned, will ultimately decide whether they want it or not.

.1620

Mr. Schrecker, as you mentioned, they weren't involved in the risks associated with some of these, but they weren't involved with the risks associated with developing the laser or artificial insemination - yes, I'm sure there were concerned risks over that - and who knows how many other technologies in the past as well. Science is not without risk. We realize that, but we have to move ahead. It's our human nature. It's necessary.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Fischer. Margaret Somerville, please.

Dr. Somerville: I would like to pick up on some of the things Mr. Fischer just said, as well as points by Ms Groote and Ms Morrow. In ethics we sometimes do an analysis at three different levels. It's very simple: micro-level, meso-level - which is institutional or group level - and macro-level, which is governmental or societal level.

I think most of the things you've said - and especially you, Mr. Fischer - are individual or micro-level ethics. What you've said is that this is good for you, you understand what's involved, it's benefited you and it could benefit your son if he were burned, and you want to do it. That's the strong case for doing what you say. It's also the easiest case to present in the media, particularly on television, because we can put somebody like you on television who can argue that, and everybody will relate to you and find you enormously convincing - and they should, as long as they realize that it's at the micro-level.

But we can't just ethically analyse what we're doing here at the micro-level. In particular, as a Parliament you have to analyse what you're doing at the governmental-societal level, and I don't think it's nearly so clear there.

To come to what Ms Groote said, which is what you were talking about, you said you thought it should be left to individual decisions. But I would suggest to you that it's only when we've decided that the risk is inherently acceptable for the society that we then should allow it to become simply a matter of individual decision-making - I presume with informed consent.

I think one of the problems we have with biotechnology at the moment is that we don't know whether the risks are inherently acceptable for society, even if we simply take the physical risks that could be involved. I think most of the discussion is very related to the physical risks that could be involved and the risk of our economic loss if we don't do that. It's an opportunity cost, it's a real loss. But we also have to think about other risks that are involved in this at the societal level, and that's much harder to discuss because it's very hard to concretize that discussion.

The only thing I would add is that some recent work has looked at people and what they feel about the risks that are facing them. There was an article by Martin Wollacott of The Guardian, where he said that people feel their major risks are things like unemployment, environment and massive disasters. They feel they have absolutely no control over those risks that are threatening them, and what they're looking for are politicians to be their risk managers. That's risk management at a societal level, and I think that's what we're involved in here.

The Chairman: Thank you.

Conrad Brunk.

Dr. Conrad Brunk (Associate Professor of Philosophy, Conrad Grebel College, University of Waterloo): Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for inviting me back to the table, since I had my say this morning. I don't want to take time away from the people who need to have time this afternoon, but I would like to raise a few questions and make a few points.

One of the elements of new biotechnology and other new technologies is that they tend to be so complex that they have this character of the benefits being obvious and immediately evident, and they are easily weighed and counted. The risks, on the other hand, are so highly uncertain, so unclear and unspecified often, that there's no way to know how to count them. So when we do the usual way we do things in setting public policy, and that is to add up the benefits and weigh them against the risks or the costs of these new technologies, if you use that standard you're going to come out strongly in favour to moving ahead and moving ahead fast.

.1625

The fundamental issue here is how do you ethically make decisions about these things when you have this wide disparity between the saliency of the benefits and risks? How is it ethical to handle high levels of uncertainty? Dr. Somerville has mentioned that there are certain elements of this question that have to do with inherently unethical things to do. They're difficult enough, and different ethical schools of thought handle them differently, but there are other questions that just are... We all agree we don't want bad consequences, but we don't know what those consequences are or what they're going to be. Then the question is what is an ethical stance to take towards that uncertainty? It's at this point where this appeal to the precautionary principle has become so important in ethical discussions. I was hoping we would get to that in this morning's session because it was one of the items that had been identified there. We didn't really get to it.

One of the things that concerns me about the way in which the precautionary principle is defined and the way it's being used in the committee documents here is that it says, if I can read it:

In respect of all substances suspected of posing a serious threat to the environment or to human health on the basis of weight of evidence, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be sufficient reason for postponing preventive or remedial measures.

I would like to point out that stated that way the precautionary principle is still putting the burden of proof on those who would allege that there is some unacceptable risk. It is not putting the burden of proof upon those who want to move ahead with the benefits, because the burden of proof is to come up with a weight of evidence claim that there is an unacceptable risk. If we just keep in mind all of the kinds of questions and concerns that have been raised in these discussions today, most of them you would not be able to get a good scientific weight of evidence claim for on the risk side. You can clearly get it on the benefits side.

What should you do in that case? Maybe the precautionary principle should be more conservative here and shift the burden of proof on those who are the so-called risk producers and risk beneficiaries to show that even a prima facie case, I might say, of risk is acceptable. Even if there's the possibility of risk it would be acceptable. I think sometimes, with respect particularly to risks that are of catastrophic proportion - that is even though the probabilities of them may be very tiny - it's appropriate to look down the road and ask, what if such a thing did happen? If we were at that point and were looking back, and we asked whether in hindsight this was an acceptable risk to take, if at the point of it having happened you'd say no, the benefits we got from it don't justify this or it's inherently unacceptable, then toward that kind of risk you want to take a very strong kind of precautionary approach.

I'd like to pick up this issue of whether the consumer should decide. Here again we see that if we let the consumer decide the question, there is a question whether the consumer has adequate information to make a reasonable choice about risks and benefits. Again, if the situation is one where benefits are evident and risks unclear, can the consumer make the choice? It's interesting to me that often promoters of the industry will say let the consumer decide, yet when it comes to the question of whether or not we should have strong labelling requirements these same people don't support strong labelling requirements. I don't know how a consumer can decide without some pretty good information on labels.

The Chairman: Thank you. Brewster Kneen.

.1630

Mr. Kneen: I'd like to go back a little. It seems to me there are a number of assumptions that go unquestioned. They appear in language like ``moving ahead'' and ``improvement'' and so on, which recur in the language of biotechnology all the time and which are clearly value statements without any factual or empirical basis. It depends on your perspective. I think the question of language is important.

I'd like to look at the question of a market. We're assuming that a market is somehow a democratic mechanism. Surely, we really shouldn't have to point out that in no way is it a democratic mechanism. It depends entirely on whether you can get there in the first place, and whether you can read the language or if you have the transportation, or more fundamentally, whether you have the money to participate in the market.

We're assuming that somehow we have an equality. That's blatantly not true, and it's becoming more untrue by the day, given the failure of our taxation policies to tax equitably. So we're aggravating that situation day by day, and then talking as if the market somehow could be a democratic means of decision-making. It's just totally wrong.

The other issue, which Margaret Somerville has pointed out very well, is that the market can only deal, in a sense, if it were such, at an individual level. It begs the question of the allocation of resources and the role of government altogether. I think at this point, particularly with the current government, or over the last decade or so, we've had the experience in Canada - and people have had it elsewhere - of the government playing a very biased role in pushing things like research and product development onto a corporate agenda.

The current position of the government is that if you want to study something, get your corporate sponsor, and then you can do it; we'll counter you, we'll balance the funds, or we'll supplement it. So what we see in fact is a high level of partisan government subsidization going on of a special interest group.

I say special interest because I don't regard business interest in the terms of biotechnology as representing, and having any mechanism or any claim to represent, the people of Canada. When I fly on an airplane and I look at the size of the business class, how small it is compared to the rest of the plane, I'm inclined to think that it is a special interest.

I think we're coming back to the question of what the role of government is. I think the role of government is to represent the interests of the people as a whole. I think we've gone a long way from that. We're drifting rapidly day by day away from the notion that the government has any responsibility in this regard. I think it's tragic. I think we're going to regret that down the road, when we look at the kinds of inequities and injustices and so on that is producing.

So when it comes to biotech, I think we have to say that much of what is coming to market, what is being offered on the market, has no social merit whatsoever. There is no social benefit. If you have enough money and have access to it, you may benefit individually in terms of the prolongation of your life or the remediation of some particular illness. But we cannot allow that to obscure the social question that the allocation of resources to deal with an individual, at the expense of health care for the vast majority of people, is an ethical issue. We are making that decision now on the basis of what? It's not parliamentary discussion, that's for sure. I think that's the issue being raised here.

Is it the responsibility of the government to attend to the interests of the people as a whole regardless of their economic class or their political power? We're certainly not there today.

I hope that we might begin to look at biotechnology and say there is no reason we have to rush new products to market now. We've been stampeded into this, and I think it's immoral and unethical. The question is if this is going to be in the public interest for the public benefit in the long run. And that includes, in the case of biotechnology, clearly not just those here now but my children, your children, their grandchildren and on down the line. Are we prepared to do that? We're not going to do that quickly. I think this question about speed has been raised more than once.

We love to talk about how fast we can do things. I think that is a totally negative characteristic in this case on ethical grounds. We're better to slow down altogether. I think it's the responsibility of the government to put a lot of roadblocks up, and if they can't get through those roadblocks, then so be it. Find something better to do. There's lots to be done.

.1635

The Chairman: Thank you. David Waltner-Toews please.

Dr. Waltner-Toews: I'd like to follow through on some comments that Marg and Conrad made with regard to the immediate benefits and the long-term consequences, because I think a lot of that has to do with scale and the fact we're dealing with an interconnected system.

When we're dealing with biotechnological processes and products we're not dealing with an industrial process. That's an illusion that gets thrown around, that this is just like exchanging a carburetor on a car. The social and ecological interactions that occur in agriculture and food are all tied together. You don't change one thing without changing another.

I can think of some examples. I've done a lot of international work. I've worked in communities where there were serious food shortages after World War II. The green revolution came along and they produced crops that were able to grow very quickly. Farmers made more money. It displaced local crops. They used a lot of pesticides and fertilizers, which meant that they couldn't use traditional fish culture. They lost a source of protein. Because they were getting more money for these fast-growing crops they displaced a lot of local crops from the market, which has now resulted in widespread micro-nutrient malnutrition and congenital malformations, including serious mental retardation, in a lot of these communities.

So you have these long-term effects because they are interconnected. The case I mentioned before, about mad cow disease, is a direct effect again of promoting high-volume, low-cost production and efficiency within that system. The natural consequence is that you're going to create pathways for those pathogens. I wasn't at all surprised that this occurred.

I agree with Mr. Fischer. I worked a lot with farmers and I would like to try to increase production within the constraints of the social and ecological system to accommodate those. I think that's the catch in this whole system.

An industry can look at their bottom line and say we can't afford to add this to change our capital investment. A farmer might say he can't afford to build a new barn. As a society, we need to also say we can't afford as a society to allow these things to go unchecked because they will likely result in institutional changes that will create serious problems for us down the line.

We've solved some public health problems through centralization - and I'm involved in a lot of those - of agriculture, putting them through centralized points of control. The end point to that might be something like food irradiation, which solves the immediate problem by in fact taking high-probability, low-consequence events and creating situations where we have low-probability, high-consequence events.

We have huge outbreaks, hundreds of thousands of people with salmonella and one outbreak and closure of major dairy industries instead of having multiple small outbreaks that are easier to control. The question is not that one extreme or the other is right. We don't want to go back to subsistence farming, but the question is how do we find some sort of a balance.

It seems to me the role of the government is to argue through what kind of a society we want to live in. Do we want to have rural communities? What kinds of farms do we want to have? It should then ask what are the consequences of that vision of our society for how we regulate innovation within that society. It seems to me you don't just allow... Innovation is good, but not all innovation is good. It's like how genetic mutations can result in all kinds of wonderful things but they can result in disasters as well.

It seems to me that somehow as a society we need to get hold of that instead of standing back and saying these are systemic effects, they're too big; we'll just let the market decide. The market won't decide. If we want a particular kind of society, we have to decide what it is we want and then move deliberately, self-consciously in that direction.

The Chairman: Thank you. Ted Schrecker.

Mr. Schrecker: This discussion is getting unremittingly gloomy, so let me try to cheer it up just a bit. There is a danger in talking about ethics and technology that one comes across as some sort of neo-Luddite looking at all the bad things that could happen, and to some extent we have, myself included, fallen into that trap in the biotechnology debates.

.1640

As Jim Fischer has reminded us, the potential benefits from biotechnological research are extremely wide-ranging. They go far beyond agricultural biotech instruction to stretch into a variety of health care interventions.

It's quite possible to appreciate all those benefits and indeed to argue, as I would in some contexts, that there is an ethical beauty to pursue them, while at the same time conceding and indeed embracing the point that genetic engineering is different. It's not better necessarily and not worse necessarily, but different and presenting a different range of opportunities as well as potential downside risks. That's the first point I wanted to make.

The second has to do much more specifically with the precautionary principle, which is, at least as far as it goes, an ethical principle. The problem is that there is also a respect in which it is vacuous. It doesn't tell us with respect to any given choice how precautionary it is ethically required to be or ethically permissible to be. In other words, it's an organizing principle for decision making but it doesn't itself have a lot of content.

There's nothing wrong with that. Most kinds of ethical decision making in public policy operate using principles like that. The more basic problem is this. I have been writing for many years about the merits of the precautionary principle as applied, for example, to toxic substances and industrial processes. I am less certain about how one goes about applying it to an entire range of potentially transformative technological developments.

Here perhaps I'm undercutting my own earlier analogies with television. I don't know exactly how you do that, particularly since - and here I have to raise one point of disagreement with Conrad Brunk - I'm not certain that the benefits are necessarily obvious and the risks difficult to identify and assess. That may be true with respect to research and development motivated by short-term commercial interests or motivated primarily by short-term commercial interests. I suspect that it is less true of basic laboratory research, which of course makes the whole precautionary approach even more difficult to implement.

The Chairman: Thank you. Gar Knutson.

Mr. Knutson: Thanks very much. I just want to respond to what Mr. Kneen was saying.

Let me propose to you and say, for example, that I'm the minister of industry and by all intents and purposes I'm a decent guy. I care about hungry kids. I know that the root cause of child poverty in this country is high unemployment, so I care about the number of jobs and the general prosperity of the country. I have all these officials telling me that if we don't get on this bandwagon, in a prudent cautious way albeit with the right regulations in place, and back industry here or the industrialists or the high-value jobs that we want for our country and the high wages and the products that we export, they're going to go somewhere else. Then, as serious as our problems are now in terms of equity, they're going to get worse.

As minister of industry, I recognize the dangers of capitalism. I don't fully embrace it. I don't buy into this business that we'll just simply let the market decide. I recognize the need to put things in balance, to have an appropriate amount of regulation.

I can't speak for the government, but it seems to me that simply putting a stop to it just isn't on. We're not prepared as a country to say we're going to slow down economic growth that might come from these new innovations until we figure things out. We're going to kind of muddle ahead. If I were the minister of industry, I might feel quite good about that, because we need the jobs. I don't think I've done anything unethical.

.1645

I just wondered what your views on that might be.

Mr. Kneen: I think I can understand your predicament, if you're creating that scenario. But I don't think I would look to biotechnology to solve the problem of unemployment. I just don't see where that's in the cards. That's a highly elite industry that's capital-intensive, and it's not going to solve that problem.

In terms of the claims for producing more food, I haven't noticed in Canada that we're short of food. Some people are desperately short of food but when you go to the grocery stores, it's clear there's enough for everybody there. The problem lies elsewhere. So it isn't a production problem.

As I say, I don't think biotech applied to agriculture or anywhere else is going to solve the problem of employment or of food production because that's not a problem.

I have to ask then what it is that we're addressing in this. It would seem to me that the resources out of the public funds that are being devoted to this, for what I think are fallacious wrongly represented reasons, could be applied to some of the social problems to address these concerns.

I'm going to say something that I know is probably sort of heretical to most people, but I've farmed for enough of my life to have some first-hand understanding of it. If you look at agriculture in particular, there are alternatives to high-tech capital-intensive agriculture. The vast majority of the world's people are not going to engage in our style of agriculture. It would destroy everything.

I think what we have to look at in fact - and it was mentioned this morning fairly articulately - is that instead of putting money into biotech for an elite, we look into sustainable agriculture.

I know that both my children would love to farm, but there's precious little opportunity because we're driving people off the farms as fast as we can in the name of efficiency and progress. You could find many people who would like to work at a different scale of agriculture that is more labour-intensive, and where you could deal with the employment problem in an incredibly direct manner. So instead of saying that we have half of one percent of our people engaged in agriculture, we could say we've got five percent and we're really moving ahead.

Mr. Knutson: The bottom line for a farmer oftentimes is the ability to export. That in and of itself sets us up in a competitive situation unless we're going to subsidize it directly through direct income transfer from the taxpayer to the farmer, which isn't on.

If farms are going to export, they have to compete in international markets and they need to have the tools that their competitors have. Whether I trust capitalism or not, I just think that's self-evident. Whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, my sense is that's the way it is.

Once the farmer wants to work for $4 an hour or if they want what most Canadians would consider a reasonable standard of living, I'm not sure how you can do that with 5% of your population producing the same volume of product.

I guess my main point is that we're in a capitalist system. Until we do away with it, we're stuck with this. And I don't see us doing away with it in the near future.

The Chairman: Thank you. We will hear from Dr. Margaret Somerville, followed by Paul Steckle, Paul Brassard, Daphne Jennings and Jim Fischer.

.1650

Dr. Somerville: I just want to make two points.

First of all, Dr. Brunk, I was very surprised when you elaborated on the precautionary principle, because I'd read the same passage as you had and I interpreted it in exactly the opposite way from what you did. I think there's a good lesson in that. We have to be extremely careful about the language we use. When you said that, I went back to read it. I read it as if there was a lack of full scientific certainty about the risks, the government would regulate and step in, which would be consistent with being precautionary, whereas you read it that until you knew that there were very serious risks, they wouldn't step in.

That leads me to the first point, which I suggest is important, that this identification of the basic presumption from which you work is probably the single most important thing you will do. You've got four choices. One choice is simply to say that biotechnology is a good thing, so let it go completely unregulated. That's a basic presumption that says yes, rah-rah biotechnology. The absolute opposite end is to say no. It's Ted Schrecker's Luddite principle: this is terrible; let's prohibit it all; no biotechnology on any count. I don't think that in Canada we're going to do either of those. I certainly hope we don't.

The other two choices are importantly different, which isn't immediately obvious. One of the other basic presumptions is to say let's do biotechnology, but we won't do it if certain risks are present. That's the way I believe Dr. Brunk interpreted the precautionary principle.

The other possibility is to say don't let's do biotechnology unless... And I would suggest to you that the ``unless'' should be unless we know it's reasonably safe and ethically acceptable. Those would be the two conditions I would put. That's a precautionary principle that would be the same as the one we currently use for marketing new drugs and medical devices under the Food and Drugs Act of Canada. That's a ``no, unless'' principle. It says let's hold it until we think it's reasonably safe. I would add to ``reasonably safe'' to get over some of the other issues and ``ethically acceptable''.

The second issue then becomes who you are going to get to implement this. I would suggest to you that one of the crucial factors here is public trust. There is a crisis of public trust, not just in this area but generally.

I think if you look at biotechnology in relation to food, you can appreciate this. About 100 years ago, when people ate food they either grew it themselves, killed it themselves, or got it from their relatives or next-door neighbours. There weren't very many people or places or events that you had to trust to know that food was safe. Paradoxically, in our era, when we tend to think there's less trust in our society, we have to trust enormous numbers of unknown people to say that our food is safe. When you add into that the fact that somehow this isn't even natural, it's been engineered in some way, that's why people get nervous about it.

I would suggest that we've got to think very carefully about what sort of a body we could set up that would give the public a feeling of what's now being called earned trust rather than blind trust. Earned trust means to trust me because I'll show that you can trust me, which means you have to continually keep earning that trust. Blind trust says to trust me because I know what's best for you and I have status, authority and power and I'll tell you what to do. That sort of trust will not work with the public with biotechnology.

The Chairman: I'm going back quickly to your fourth option: don't let's do biotechnology unless it is reasonably and ethically acceptable. Will you then define for us what the definition of ethically acceptable is?

Dr. Somerville: Coming back to the points of Ms Morrow and Ms Groote, it is true that there is a level of individual ethics where our values differ and we won't agree. But we can do ethics analysis.

For instance, take Dr. Michael Walzer's theories, where he calls them thick and thin ethics. Thick ethics means you put a lot of principles in. You put a lot of things in that you'd want to be fulfilled before you'd say it's ethical. You can come down from that to the thinnest ethics.

Perhaps the thinnest form of ethics is simply that you get a group of people you think are moral people, who have some knowledge about what they're doing, where you've got a proper scope of representation and you've got no conflict of interest. That group of people says this is acceptable. You can label that as ethically acceptable.

I think we should be somewhere in the middle of that thick and thin model, which says there are some principles that as a society we can agree on. I think there are some. As well, we're going to need an ethics process. That ethics process has to be one that very much elicits public trust.

.1655

The Chairman: In the case of nuclear power, would you think that the bomb would have been dropped in 1945 if the counsel of ethically acceptable would have been applied?

Dr. Somerville: That's a very interesting question. One of the things I would warn about with having a group that makes these decisions is that we know from our experience in ethics decision-making in medicine that you can get an ethics committee, for instance, approving certain medical research where you get a decision made that something is acceptable to do, but if you canvass that committee member by member afterward it is possible for each member of the committee to say ``I wouldn't have approved that personally, but everybody else sort of created the atmosphere in which I thought we should approve it''. So we do have to be careful that group phenomena can dilute the effect of individual ethics. We need both individual ethics and group ethics operating concurrently.

As to dropping the bomb, one of the things I struggle with is I try to think whether there's any principle of universal ethics. The one I've come closest to is that I think we could say that you must not torture. Even there, some people have said what about if it was just a little bit of torture but you could save lots of people - wouldn't you think that was ethically acceptable? I'm not sure... I think probably there are some ethical prohibitions. For instance, at the moment certainly I would say animal-human hybrids would be an ethical prohibition. Interfering with the human in that way I would see as an ethical prohibition.

The Chairman: Thank you. Paul Steckle, please.

Mr. Steckle: I hardly know where to begin. I've agreed with much of what has been said and I've also disagreed with a considerable... I think if we have one thing around this group setting today it is that we have a consensus of disagreement. That's not unusual on this particular topic.

We've discussed biotechnology and today we're discussing ethics and morals. I really question how those of us around this table today can come to believe that we will ever resolve the rightness or the wrongness or how far we go with this, given the fact that we have many examples where people have clearly been given the choice of participating in a particular habit: the habit of smoking; alcohol; in terms of our sexuality, HIV - we know the consequences of these things, yet has our society changed the course? Is it fair that they continue on their course, given the fact that the burden of cost is going to be spread around to all of the taxpayers that are paying for this? How do we expect then that we can tackle the unknown?

Like my friend Jim Fischer, who happens to live not too far from where I live and shares the same kinds of interests I do, I'm not opposed to biotechnology, because I think if it hadn't been for that, agriculture wouldn't be where it's at today in terms of meeting our commitments towards our goals of $20 billion of exports by the year 2000. I think these are all wonderful, inspiring goals we're reaching for.

Given the fact that we could produce product today and we can produce our crops much more cheaply, our friend at the end of the table here suggested that we could put people back to work. Absolutely. We have many people who could go back to work on the farm. But we're not going to give up the combine for the hoe. We're simply not going to do that.

I guess the question is that given the fact that we have so many examples where people have chosen to do the things that we know have consequences attached to them - those examples are here and now, and we've experienced the consequences of those actions - can we expect that we can come to terms with the issues we're talking about today? I question whether we can.

I like Margaret Somerville's precautionary principle. Are we practising it in smoking and in all the other things I've mentioned? I really question whether we're going to come to grips with this. This has aggravated the debate, perhaps, but I think it had to be said today.

Dr. Somerville: You see, if you came to alcohol and smoking and you asked who decides, on what basis, for what purpose, and you say what are the values that are involved there, then what you've got is individual liberty at a cost to society, because we've got a community health care we all share in. But in that particular case we've decided that respect for individual liberty outweighs our concerns in the other respect.

.1700

What your statement showed is that we have to have two things. We have to set up a conceptual structure so that we know what we're dealing with here. It's like a big mosaic and you know what the picture on the mosaic is. When dealing with an issue, you're dealing with one tiny little tile on that mosaic and not the whole picture, but you have to have the two things simultaneously in mind.

So it might be that in a given instance you'll say no, here individual liberty is trumps, and not only because of the individual but also because it's important to the society that we uphold the value of individual liberty. Yet in another case you'll say no, the balance is tipped the other way.

I like to call it ``living in the purple-pink middle'', because I think grey is so dull. It's also the colour of depression. Purple-pink is the colour of the imagination. So you imagine that you don't live at the red pole or the blue pole, but you live in this imaginative middle where you have both the excitement and the experience but also the responsibility of making these tough decisions.

What you can do is give yourself a head start on the decisions by understanding the underlying concepts and by setting up a structure that will help you to make those decisions.

You can never be absolutely sure you've made an ethically right decision - that's not true. You can be absolutely sure you tried to the best of your ability to make the ethically right decision. You can't be absolutely sure it will prove to have been absolutely the right decision.

Mr. Steckle: One thing you have done is brought some colours to this committee. We didn't realize those colours existed. We were usually dealing with some form of green, and somehow we've departed from that.

One question still remains for me. When government sees we have made a mistake, or that we have erred in our judgment in terms of policy, at what point do we find we need to turn the corner and go in the other direction?

Dr. Somerville: From my experience in medical malpractice, I would suggest you warn people in advance that you're not certain. That's not easy for politicians to do because they see that as interfering with political viability. We know people get very angry and hostile when they feel their trust has been breached. They feel they were told, for instance, that this is safe, and then it turns out not to be.

We're going to have to take a new approach here of saying we're not sure that it's absolutely safe, but we've done everything we can to make sure this is the best decision for us to take. That's what we're going to do, and we're going to keep you informed as we go along.

There's an interesting contrast between what we did with HIV and what we've just done with CJD, where Health Canada has decided to inform the public, as we go along, about what's going on with that.

The Chairman: Thank you.

We'll have Paul Brassard, followed by Daphne Jennings.

Mr. Brassard: I'd just like to respond to Mr. Steckle.

I certainly don't want him to get the impression that we're saying that biotechnology is bad and we shouldn't have it at all. What we're saying is there are some limits.

I'd like to concur with Dr. Brunk, and use a concrete example. Obviously, what has been developed is a canola that you can pour all the Roundup you want on, and it won't hurt it; it will kill every other weed that's around, though. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to recognize that over time something is going to happen to those weeds. They're not going to become susceptible to being endangered by the Roundup either. It looks like the benefit is really there, but it is very debatable in the long term. This doesn't show up.

The Chairman: Thank you.

Daphne Jennings, welcome to the committee.

Mrs. Jennings: First of all, I found this very interesting. There are certainly a lot of different opinions. Language plays a great part in this, I must agree - who we are, where we're coming from, and what our personal experience has been when we come to this table.

There are a couple of things that bother me. For those of you who do not know me, I am new to the environment committee, although I've been active as a teacher for 30 years and worked in the environment with students. I picked up this KPMG environmental consultants report recently. It's a study comparing the U.S. experience with Canada's. There are a couple of statements in here. One says that `` Canada has a comparatively effective regulatory system for biotechnology-derived products''. My first question on that is, by whose standards? Why is this statement made?

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I've spent a lot of my life in the courtroom. Although I'm not a lawyer, I've been on the other side. It's not a very comfortable position to be in, so I suspect a lot of the things I read.

Another statement says: ``A powerful industry voice or a supportive public constituency has yet to emerge that could influence regulatory policy and review positively towards technology''. That's referring to Canada. Yet over the page it says: ``Biotechnology R&D - both conventional and using the newer genetic manipulation techniques - is widespread, and has been generally well accepted by the public...''. That's a complete contradiction.

I don't know very much about biotechnology, and I'm certainly not against biotechnology. We already have some very enjoyable fruits and vegetables that I enjoy eating, and I wouldn't like to be without them. I became involved because of rBST injections into dairy cows. I read and I read and I read, trying to get up on the topic, so I would have at least perhaps the level to discuss it with some of you here. The more I read the more uncomfortable I became. So I asked my constituents what they knew about rBST. I read according to this that the public's pretty well informed. Yet 94% of my constituents had never even heard about this. Why aren't we letting the public know what's going on?

My constituents come from a very active, academic community. They're loggers, they're fishermen. Their academia is very high. So I gave them both sides of the question, which is what I've always done to students. I know nothing about the issue, so I try to give them both sides. There was a very high 4.6% return, and 94% of those that came back said ``We don't want you injecting our dairy cows with it''. Many of them couldn't understand why we were injecting the dairy cows when we throw milk out in this country. I didn't have the answers. What could I tell them?

Dr. Somerville, I have to agree with you on something. You talked about trust, and what people are uncomfortable with. Yes, people are very uncomfortable with what they don't understand.

I believe my job as a politician is to be accountable and to be responsible. When the people come to me with a fear, I have to somehow answer that fear. So I come to you, the experts who deal with this every day. I think you're right. It has to be an earned trust. That's the only way we can go.

They want to know from day to day that this trust is still there, and it should be there. Dr. Somerville, can the public be a part of deciding on what those principles of society are that we agree on? I say to you, they must be part of that.

Mr. Fischer, that of course slows down this process you want to speed up so fast. We all know that the more people get involved, it's not going to be done as quickly.

I suggest to you all here that we have to be cautious, because we're not talking about everyday things that we spoke of 100 years ago. We're talking about genes and changing the very things that are there.

I don't want to be doom and gloom, because many of the things we've come up with are fantastic. Are we going in the right direction, and if we are, could we somehow get the language down and the public's knowing what's going on? Many of the public would be very uncomfortable at this table right now. They probably wouldn't be able to understand a lot of it, and they probably would not feel right. That makes me uncomfortable.

On the one hand, I commend you all for taking the time to be here, and giving us your advice. On the other hand, please help me, because as a politician I need your help.

Thank you.

The Chairman: The document referred to by Daphne Jennings is a document that was presented and discussed last week.

Jim Fischer, please.

Mr. Fischer: Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'm going to bounce around a little bit, and then come right back to what Miss Jennings said.

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Mr. Knutson, a few moments ago you made a very good comment about a what-if scenario. I gather it was a result of Mr. Kneen saying to block, block, block through the regulatory system - though maybe not in so many words.

We're here around this table discussing ethics, of course, so this isn't just a personal thing, Ms Somerville. I'd hate to fathom what the ethical ramifications would be, however, if we were to be isolated in the developed world community with respect to not letting these other food products across the border, or what the ramifications would be to our farmers if we did block to the degree that I sense I'm gathering from Mr. Kneen.

I think what you asked was a very good question. I would be very concerned about that indeed. If we were to fall behind significantly at a time when we we are going to see, I suspect, many more products available for our consumers to use, the ramifications would be rather frightening. And that is not a scaremongering tactic.

The other thing I'd like to briefly mention has to do with what Mrs. Jennings said. I'm not rah-rah on biotechnology - please don't misconstrue that - but there are certain aspects that I may or may not use with regard to genetic engineering. I look on it as a tool, as I look on any new technology, whether it be something physical - that is, a piece of machinery - or something to do with the computer. It may be hard to understand, but I think our farm is unique from that of the fellow dairy farmer down the road. So my wife and I would have to decide as to whether or not we'd proceed with it or not. But I do appreciate your comments.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The Chairman: Thank you. Clifford Lincoln, please.

Mr. Lincoln: While listening to Mrs. Jennings, my colleague from the opposition, whom I haven't had too much of a chance to speak to, I was struck by how much she expressed what I feel very deeply about our position as parliamentarians. I think I share Mr. Brewster Kneen's feeling about interest groups and how government is always there, or is supposed to be there, to represent the great broad spectrum of the people, the citizens at large. And the government is these people like Mrs. Jennings, Mr. Caccia, myself and my colleagues here.

I realize biotechnology is a necessary process. It is very much essential to our future and we can't be obstructed from it. At the same time, between our first element that Dr. Somerville spoke about - going ahead at full steam - or banning it altogether, both of which we don't want, we look at items three and four that she has suggested: ``let's do it unless''... We add the safety factor that we are conscious of. We add the ethical factor. We can more or less assess society's dimension because we are part of it.

When it translates itself into everyday practice, when we get into a caucus and we have to discuss rBST, whether we okay it or we don't okay it, I think our caucus somehow translates the feeling of a lot of Canadians. We are very uncomfortable with it. We know it's something we're scared of because we don't know about it, and we cannot find out about it. There are two camps out there - maybe two ministries or bodies of scientists - one of which is saying it's very safe, while the other one is saying we should use the precautionary principle because it's very unsafe. The Americans are saying they use it, and the Canadians are saying that if the Americans are using it then we should too, because we have to compete.

Frankly, we are faced with an ethical decision, one that is individual in scope when it gets to each one of us, about things no matter whether we inform ourselves about them or whether we try to speak to experts who are divided among themselves.

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It's very hard for us to come to decisions that are far-sighted and totally objective. I think I reflect the views of many of my colleagues who I have discussed rBST with. Today my colleague Mr. Forseth and I just came from the House and were discussing whether we ban MMT or not. He doesn't feel there's conclusive evidence. Our party says no, there's enough there; let's use a kind of precautionary principle. So both of us are doing this totally in good faith, yet we are taking completely diverse positions.

That precautionary principle, which is really the prevention of long-term ills for society, is what we have to apply. I was listening to Mr. Schrecker say that we used to have the Law Reform Commission, which was an objective body, to guide us and help us legislate, and we cancelled it. We used to have the science advisory council and we cancelled it. Many such bodies were there to guide us, I believe, in an objective fashion.

I'm just going to toss in that idea. Here we are dealing with not the practical day-to-day things that laymen such as ourselves can understand... And we can find out if we talk about things like artificial insemination, if we talk about things that we can digest well. But now we're talking about a realm that is far more problematic, the realm of gene mutation and transgenic species. And frankly, I'm the first to admit that I'm lost in this thing. I just read what I read. I try to understand it in the most intelligent way possible, given my background and means and small staff. At the end of it, I'm left with very serious questions as to what positions I take one way or another.

Do you think there is room for us? And frankly, when I heard Paul Steckle mention that there was a lot of disagreement here, it was the kind of disagreement that I really enjoy. I didn't feel there was disagreement. There were different points of view, which were... At the same time, I felt that if tomorrow a body such as this one here - forgetting about us as parliamentarians - came to a consensus, I would feel very comfortable with it. I would realize that it was formed of a balance of people like Mr. Fischer, who is a farmer dealing with it on a day-to-day basis, and scientists, ethical people and lawyers, who have a totally objective view of these things. No doubt they have a bias, but... And if such a body would come to a decision here and tell me that they have looked at rBST, yes, it would certainly influence the way I think about things.

Facing what we face today with biotechnology - the ethical question - do you think there should be some advisory body that would make recommendations on an objective basis to people like us who are screaming for that kind of help? I think Mrs. Jennings asked for it, and I would certainly love it myself.

Dr. Somerville: Can I answer that, Mr. Chairman?

The Chairman: Yes, briefly.

Dr. Somerville: Yes, I think there should be one. You might be interested to know that President Clinton has just appointed a national bioethics advisory committee for the United States, which will be chaired by Dr. Harold Shapiro, who is president of Princeton University. It's meeting for the first time next month. They've asked for Canadian representation at the meeting.

The Chairman: Thank you.

Brewster Kneen is next, and then the last word goes to Joyce Groote.

Mr. Kneen: Two ethical issues have arisen that in a sense haven't been addressed but have somehow been taken as unquestionable normative social principles of the present age.

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A couple of weeks ago I received a press release - I'm not sure where it came from - about the Canadian food inspection agency, and one line gave me the key to the brief comments I want to make: ``Consumer protection and the promotion of Canadian trade and commerce will be the agency's prime objectives''. I'm afraid I find that problematic. I don't know how you talk about consumer protection and the promotion of trade as equals, in one sentence.

But what we have been hearing here, stated very clearly, is that we must export agriculture and we must be competitive in the global market. I have serious ethical problems with both of those statements, because I do not understand how Canada has a right or an ethical right to export agriculture. I have to ask who the recipient is and what it does to the economy that imports our food.

I can't just say that's a right we have. The United States says the same thing. Everybody says we have to export, and I say ``Wait a minute. Who's on the other side and how do they do this? What happens?'' It isn't transparent to me by a long shot, and it isn't self-evident that this is a moral principle or an ethical principle that I can accept. I can't.

I'm afraid that, again, I have to take exception to the current norm. Being competitive is not my primary ethical principle. In fact, I find it very low on my list, and probably not on it at all. How I treat my neighbours and how I respect and live with others is far more important than how competitive I am with them, because I'm seeing the competitive principle destroying the social fabric on which we all depend.

And then we wonder why we have violence, we wonder why we have the disruption of our society. We're breeding it deliberately by talking about being competitive all of the time. I don't like it; it's totally unethical. And we have to put biotechnology in that context. I do not think there are any grounds on which to say we have to pursue this because otherwise we won't be competitive. That is not, in my mind, in any way an ethical principle for proceeding with biotechnology. On the contrary, it goes just the other way.

The Chairman: Thank you. Joyce Groote, please.

Ms Groote: Thank you very much. I'm afraid I'm going to bounce around a little bit as well. I'd like to respond to a number of things that have been said.

I'm certainly not an expert in ethics, but I have participated in a number of discussions like this. In my experience, one of the biggest difficulties is that we really need to define not only the language we're talking about, but the level at which we're talking. We're jumping around between talking about biotechnology and in the next minute about products such as rBST.

You're absolutely right, a lot of people do not understand what biotechnology is. But if you ask them if they've heard about DNA, they'll say yes - O.J. Simpson or Bernardo. Or if you ask them about rBST, they'll say they've heard about that too. They've heard about some of the products, but they don't have a real understanding of the technology.

Some of our earlier attempts to communicate were at the broader level of what biotechnology is, and people simply didn't care. The bottom line is ``How is it going to affect me?'' That's for the products. I think the ethical discussion is going to have to be very much the same.

In dealing with ethics, we've tried to deal with certain areas like gene therapy, intellectual property and agriculture, and the discussion went round and round. In another case, we said we'd just talk about biotechnology. That discussion went on for two years and it's still not resolved. The third time was looking at food biotechnology. We said we'd divide it into its ethical, economic and social components. We still had difficulty. The only time we really started to deal with it was when we were dealing with specific products, and that might be a good way to make this discussion go forward.

I really think the discussion is important. I agree that we need to come up with some basis for what the societal norms are, but we also need to have that information and we really need to understand on a personal level what that's going to mean individually so that we can make that decision when we go to the marketplace.

One of the other interesting things we have learned when trying to itemize all of the issues that came out of asking what the ethics surrounding biotechnology are was that you could list a whole range of issues, but when you actually asked how many of these were unique to biotechnology, the list became very much shorter. I think we're into a situation where biotechnology is actually serving as a lightning rod. It's making us ask very fundamental questions about key issues. Those are the issues that perhaps we need to start looking at.

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I guess the other thing is just to respond a little to the discussion going on between Mr. Knutson and Mr. Kneen. It's just the inevitability: biotech products are here. We have a total of 24 products on the market right now. There are many more in the United States, and if we don't export these products, we certainly will be importing them. We are in a situation where we can either benefit from that, or not. It's a very pragmatic stance, because if we're going to be eating them - let's say, food biotechnology - should we have developed them in our country, or should we be importing them from another country?

I guess the last thing is just looking at biotechnology again. We keep looking at it as an end in itself. It's such a small component of what we're dealing with. It is a tool. It's an approach. In itself I don't think the technology can be rated as good or bad. I think we can look at individual applications of that technology, and make decisions as to whether those products, or the application of those products, are good or bad.

I would suggest that it might be useful to move this discussion forward at some later point, looking at specific product applications. It's a level we can all identify with.

Thank you.

The Chairman: Thank you.

[Translation]

You have the floor, Mr. Asselin.

Mr. Asselin: First of all, I think the problems with biotechnology are related to a shortage of producers. A few years ago, we all had our little garden and produced our own vegetables. We got our meat from our uncles or our grandfather. Now, there are fewer and fewer farmers.

In addition, there are more and more consumers. In a capitalist world, one of production and quotas, there are fewer and fewer producers and more and more consumers. That means that farmers try to get more and more milk from fewer and fewer cows. Farmers take steps to have cows produce twice as much milk, and in order to respect their quotas requirements, they get rid of half of their cattle.

The same goes for vegetables. We are trying to grow more and more vegetables on less and less land. That is much more cost-effective. This again is related to a problem of quotas in a capitalist system. What about meat? I remember that in my grandfather's day, Mr. Chairman, animals ate grass during the summer and in winter they were fed natural products, like hay and grain.

Today, because of artificial insemination and hormones, producers try to get two calves per cow each year. Otherwise, the cow is not cost effective. It is well known that today it takes 37 days to raise a chicken from hatching to maturity. After 37 days, the chicken is ready for distribution and consumption.

The growth of these chickens is forced by feeding them hormones. In addition, chickens are often fed on one day what came out of them the day before. Since they never get out of their cages, chickens grow up without having enough time to digest what they hate the day before. So they are fed their excrements.

In the past, farmers were content with a double-yoke egg. Today, they try to get hens to lay two eggs a day. That is much more profitable.

Earlier, we said that we are afraid that we might create a monster with biotechnology. I think the monster already exists. It exists at the moment in the form of cancer. Today, more and more people have cancer of the skin, liver, bowels or kidneys, all of which are vital organs. Mr. Chairman, this is all linked to chemistry and to the fact that we are eating products that result from biotechnology. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Asselin.

[English]

Would anyone else like to make a final comment? If not, it seems to me that Clifford Lincoln summed it up very well at the meeting, as it evolved this afternoon, when he made his intervention.

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Speaking personally, I will remember this meeting for some of the points made as we progressed, including the point that technology influences ethics. This is something we have to analyse in a more in-depth way. Also, the complexity and benefits of biotechnology are particularly evident and the risks are uncertain. I think this is a very important and helpful observation.

The fourth option offered to us by Margaret Somerville is certainly a very attractive one in terms of the protection of the public interest. She is saying let's not do biotechnology unless it is reasonably safe and ethically acceptable. I suppose a good number of Daphne Jennings' constituents would endorse this. I'm just daring to make this assumption without knowing one person in her riding, and I apologize for that.

Certainly the suggestion of an advisory board seemed to me very timely, as Clifford suggested. One thing is clear, at least. There is here the relationship of the turtle and the hare between the speed of technological advancement and the capacity of mankind to keep up with this speed. We are lagging more and more behind and we are having great difficulties in grasping the types of measures needed in order to catch up with this very fast hare called technology.

That gap is getting larger. Look, for instance, at the royal commission on new reproductive technologies, which produced its report over three years ago, I believe. The Department of Health only answered this report six months ago, and we don't have legislation yet, while reproductive technology is galloping ahead at phenomenal speed, leaving all of us behind.

We fit into this larger debate. What we have done today is we have moved one small step forward, but at least we have moved a little bit forward.

This is my concluding observation, for what it is worth. Maybe we can draw some guidance from the thoughts and reflection on ethics by the great philosophers over the centuries, because what they said, and what we learned at school from what they said, may still be a good guide for us today. Perhaps we might want to have another session just with philosophers and see where we land, in the hope we might land somewhere.

I see you smiling. You may want to make your final comment and then we'll conclude, Mr. Brunk.

Mr. Brunk: It probably would be a disaster.

The Chairman: With this observation, then, the onus falls back on the shoulders of the legislators, or the parliamentarians. They were not forced to run. They are there because they thought they would have answers. So we had better demonstrate we have them. Right?

Thank you very much. This meeting is adjourned.

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