Honourable senators, I rise today to speak to Bill S-252, with both pride and sadness — pride that this chamber will now take on this issue, and sadness that, 20 years after the tainted blood crisis, we still haven’t moved to fix an obvious problem. It seems we are living through the old adage that if we don’t learn from our history, we are doomed to repeat it.

This bill, I hope, will prevent that from happening, but there is still a lot of work to do.

Most of the young people I know today have no memory or knowledge of the tainted blood scandal, one of the greatest crimes this country has ever witnessed. Tainted blood took thousands of lives and infected thousands more. In fact, over 30,000 Canadians were infected with HIV and hepatitis C due to contaminated blood and blood products. It is estimated that over 8,000 Canadians will yet die as a result.

What is so profoundly sad is that it was a preventable tragedy.

The government of the day appointed Justice Horace Krever to investigate what went wrong. Today we must remember his plea — to protect our blood supply by ensuring it remains a voluntary system and not a cash-for-blood system.

This is an issue I have raised on several occasions in the Senate because, for more than 20 years, I have come to know people whose lives were put at risk, and I count them as friends. As a journalist, I interviewed these victims or their loved ones. Far too many are no longer with us to tell their stories or make the case to keep our blood system voluntary. Many more are mere shadows of their former vibrant selves. Their families were devastated, children were orphaned, and men and women were widowed.

Judge Krever had it right: A not-for-profit, volunteer, publicly accountable blood collection system is what Canada needs. We want people volunteering to donate blood because it is the right thing to do, not because they want a gift card. To see posters posted above urinals in universities enticing young men to sell their blood strikes a blow at the very heart of our volunteer system. It undermines our natural instincts to be altruistic — to be our brother’s or sister’s keeper.

As we so recently witnessed with the case of the Humboldt Broncos, people’s instinct was to give life-saving blood, and they did. The same thing happened in Toronto after the recent van attack incident.

Giving blood has long been a common thing for people, but after the crisis it became a little more complicated. So we must ensure that volunteerism continues.

Cash for blood incentivizes the wrong behaviour. Canadian donors are not meant to be a revenue stream for private companies looking to make a profit. And there is evidence that a cash-for-blood system undermines the precious voluntary system. Today there are billboards along Saskatchewan highways pleading for donations.

It is also important that Canada should be self-sufficient in blood and blood products. Paid-for blood is all exported and sold to the highest bidder. Let me say that again. None of the blood that is collected from paid donors in Canada stays in this country.

That is why Ontario, Alberta and, recently, British Columbia have banned for-profit plasma companies. Quebec has had a long-standing policy since 1993 or 1994 of banning the risky business of paying for blood.

So why are the private, paid-plasma clinics currently operating in Saskatchewan and New Brunswick even allowed? Some say it is all about jobs. Canadian Plasma Resources, the company that runs these clinics, is foreign-controlled, but it has an operating licence from Health Canada. It has created only a handful of jobs in those two provinces, although they are keen to expand.

We need to remember this: The licensing of paid-plasma clinics in Canada contravenes every single fundamental recommendation of the Krever inquiry.

Today, 80 per cent of Canada’s voluntary blood system is protected, as I’ve noted, in the provinces of Ontario, Quebec, B.C. and Alberta. However, this could mean that the smaller provinces will end up being host to the private paid-plasma industry because they want the few jobs.

Health Canada has made it clear that since the practice of licensing paid plasma is not actually illegal at the federal level, there is nothing restricting the agency from issuing more licences to the private company, to Canadian Plasma Resources, CPR, and other companies alike, and there are already some 18 private paid-plasma licences in the queue. We need an immediate moratorium on the granting of any new licences until this issue is fully vetted.

Canadian Blood Services, which was formed after the Krever report, and which does what the Red Cross once did, is responsible for the management of our blood system. They have repeatedly warned the federal government to stop issuing licences to paid-plasma brokers because all of the plasma that is being collected by these private companies will be sold on the international market to the highest bidder and is not even used for Canadian patients. However, their warnings continue to be ignored by Health Canada.

It is clear that a federal law must be in place in order to restrict Health Canada from undermining the security of the Canadian blood supply by allowing more of these private, for-profit clinics.

Justice Krever warned of this. He said:

The relationship between a regulator and the regulated must never become one in which the regulator loses sight of the principle that it regulates only in the public interest and not in the interests of the regulated.

This situation is actually shocking — that a country on the leading edge of health care delivery allows blood brokering to continue. It is a problem on many levels. Who is selling their blood, and why? Are we allowing these cash-for-blood operations to set up in areas where they will attract people whose health may already be compromised? Are we exploiting young people at universities who are always short of cash?

The experts will argue that we have checks and balances in our system. And, yes, these cash-for-blood clinics are inspected and regulated. However, the issue is not clean floors or comfy chairs; the issue is clean blood.

We didn’t know what HIV was when it turned up, so we couldn’t test for it. We didn’t know the dangers of hepatitis C when it turned up, so we couldn’t test for it. We don’t know what the next blood-borne evil will be, so we can’t test for that, either.

Still, despite all the new science in the world, the best preventative measure against tainted blood is to have a safe and known source of blood.

So you can understand why many of us are a little skeptical when we’re told that all is safe now — but you can’t find what you don’t know you’re looking for.

The point of this bill is a simple one: Let’s be better safe than sorry, as Krever pleaded with us to do. One of the other compelling issues here is that the federal government must take into consideration that once plasma collection is privately owned, the Canadian public and the Canadian government will no longer have control over or even access to that precious resource.

This might one day be a real issue of national security. We don’t want our resources or our financial institutions owned or controlled by foreigners, so why on earth would we allow our blood system or our blood supply to be in the hands of foreigners? What happens when we have our next crisis — a SARS epidemic or a 9/11 terrorist incident? How will we ensure that we have safe, clean blood in our own country for our own needs?

Private paid plasma clinics in Canada do not benefit Canadians. They are not integrated into our blood system. They are privately owned corporations aimed at making a profit off Canadian plasma for export.

I ask all of you to join in this debate, to raise the issues that concern you when it comes to the safety and security of our blood supply. I ask you to raise these issues in the chamber, at committee, with government leaders and in our communities. And I ask that you work with me to pass this bill quickly.

As Justice Krever stated:

A fundamental value that must guide the blood supply system in Canada is that blood is a public resource, given altruistically by persons in Canada for the benefit of other persons in this country. Profit should not be made from the blood which is donated in Canada.

It was true 20 years ago when Justice Krever made that statement and it’s true today. Thank you.