Date: July 13, 2005
Location: Senate Chambers, Ottawa


Honourable senators, it is a privilege and I think in an hour I might consider it a pleasure to have been here, I do not know.

I am amazed that you are still functioning after all the hours you have already put in. I doubt whether I would be. I will try not to use 35 words where one will do and be as precise as possible.

I am here in several roles actually. One, I am Director of Public Policy for the Canadian Christian Medical and Dental Society. Two, I am a retired Professor of Biochemistry and Paediatrics from the University of Ottawa, and three, I am a Professor of History of Science and Medicine at Augustine College. Four, I now earn my living on the international lecture circuit talking about ethics, culture, faith and public policy, giving somewhere in the order of 400 lectures a year and going around the world once. It is a very interesting life, not one that I would have predicted even five years ago. That is my background so that you have some idea of my biases as we say, but hopefully not everything is biased. Someone must hit the target occasionally.

It is a privilege to be here for the chamber of sober second thought because that clearly is what is needed at the moment. I represent in the medical sense approximately 1500 Canadian physicians. I would like at the outset to say respectfully that it is utterly inappropriate to call physicians homophobic when they have cared for homosexual people with HIV, when they have had HIV positive blood on their hands as I have. I resent greatly anyone who uses that word. It has no place and I hope it has none here. Certainly I will not use it. Those who use it I believe are the bigots. Therefore let us put all the invective to one side.

We as an organization and I personally have a number of problems with this bill. They begin with questions of definition, which you will have heard a lot about, but obviously with my background I am particularly concerned about the health implications and, of course, the associated health costs. I am going to briefly touch on some of these issues. If you want a longer version, my colleague, Professor Edward Tingley, and I actually put together a document called 22 Mistakes about Marriage, which you can have on request. It was sent to every senator but whether it got to you or not is another issue.

Marriage obviously cannot be extended to homosexuals without changing its meaning. The traditional meaning of marriage was between one man and one woman. It is not a question of straight forward extension. The first question is one of definition. It must be redefined. In order to redefine it, as has already been said even in the short time that I have been here, it must exclude any reproductive function. That is an entirely novel idea in the history of the world. As Chesterton would say, those who propose it are certainly practicing chronological snobbery. They would not be understood by anyone in the history of the world up until the last half century.

All Canadians are the product of one man and one woman, so this essential activity is necessary to the continuance of Canada. The state as such has a primary interest in this. It has, as Trudeau said, little or no interest in what happens in the bedroom, except insofar as it produces Canadians. We are, of course, only just managing to stay afloat. Our abortion rate more or less exactly matches our immigration rate. All countries in the Western World, except the U.S.A., are declining in population and some of them very rapidly. The future of the Western World, however, is politically going to be very different. I am surprised that politicians seem not to have taken note of this.

Last year in foreign affairs there was a very interesting paper about the demography of the Western World, pointing out that it is going down. There was an even more interesting tail piece by this British demographer, a tail piece that he was not pleased about but felt necessary to quote. He said: "Nevertheless, in the Western World people of faith are having three children; secularists are having one. The future of the Western World already belongs to people of faith. The Bush victory is not an aberration. It is the picture of the future. The only question is which faith will be it. It will not be secularism."

For France and Germany it could well be Islam. With the trial of the murderer of Theo van Gogh and the happenings in London last week, we know that that might lead to a lot of tensions. Certainly the passage of this bill will provide a lot of extra fuel for those imams who are recruiting such young men. The decadence of the Western World is one of their recurrent themes, and they will certainly portray this bill in that way.

We know that children do best with male and female parents, so much so that an unbiased organization like the American Academy of Paediatrics and indeed the Canadian one have both said that, It is not a question of what we would like to believe, it is simply a question of our duty to the care of children. They do better.

In particular, of course, any country that is interested in the problem of male crime should recognize that something of the order of two thirds of juveniles and young adults committing serious felonies come from families with no father or no parent. Fathers are far more important than mothers to the prevention of criminality later on. Male models are much more important than female models for the prevention of criminality in young males.

There is no other condition naturally set up to furnish and generate the perpetually replenishing volumes of love on the requisite scale for the welfare of children apart from that condition in which that child is your child. This is an explosive and unfathomable fact: To stand just outside the delivery suite when men come out, having seen their first baby arrive, is one of the wonders of the world. They are in shock and they are changed in that instance. The day before they could not care less who was in charge of the traffic crossings or the schoolyards, but the day after they do.

Women seem to have something built in. They understand these things in advance. Men, it seems, have to hold their own child in their arms and it does something to them. Frequently in Paediatrics I have seen young women medical students taking a baby in their arms, give it back quickly and say: "This is a problem, I am having maternal urges." I have never heard a young man say that he is having paternal urges. It needs to be their own. It just happens to be the truth.

The most professional of expensive daycare workers will not lose one night of sleep if they do not see your child again, but you will. That is the difference, and nobody can measure it. That does not mean to say it does not exist. We are seeing more and more patients whose primary problem is disordered living rather than disease, as we used to understand it. This is an extraordinary phenomenon and as far as I know it is not yet
commented upon in any textbook.

When I began in medicine 50 years ago, most of the patients I saw came because of something that had happened to them. Nature or God had struck them down in some way. Even smoking was not their fault because we did not know it was dangerous 50 years ago, or at least we were just learning. Only about 30 per cent were in the office because of what they had done to themselves. Now, of course, that ratio is reversed or worse. Most patients come into the office today rather like an iceberg. They come in with an excuse that brings them to the doctor because they feel awful. Say that excuse is a sexually transmitted disease, and they feel guilty about it. Obviously, you cannot not feel guilty about such a thing if you have induced it or collected it, especially if you passed it on to your spouse. Given modern treatment, except in three cases perhaps, we can treat it excellently, so we slice off the top of the iceberg. We do nothing about the guilt.

In fact, medicine can do nothing about guilt. Most Canadians are suffering from real guilt because there is objective moral truth, and we all know it. We are in the middle of an extraordinary experiment. We are trying to convince ourselves that we do not know things that we do know. We all know that to do gratuitous harm to other people is wrong. There is no one here who does not know that. We all know that friendship is good. There is no one here who does not know that. Yet, we are passing legislation and allowing ways of living which do gratuitous harm to others. That is incoherent.

That is the reason we talk so much. I noted it this evening already. We talk about how we feel. Have you noticed that? We do not lay out arguments. We do not deal with our thoughts. We deal with our feelings because our really deep knowledge is moral knowledge. Moral feelings are very unreliable. Moral knowledge is nearly 100 per cent failsafe, so we play on the feelings.

If you want to read about this, brilliantly described, I recommend to you a book by J. Budziszewski from the University of Texas, a brilliant man. It is called What We Can't Not Know, published by Spence. It is an absolutely brilliant discussion that I think every politician would benefit from reading. He himself was hired by the University of Texas to develop a system of governance that did not require morality. He almost committed suicide before he gave up, because it cannot be done.

You, as legislators, are responsible for deciding what ought to be done in Canada. That is not possible except with some very clever examples that some philosophers will make to get from an is to an ought. You should never allow philosophy to choose the example. You should choose.

I suggest you use this example. I know Senator Anne Cools well enough to use her as my victim. Let us imagine, for a moment, that she has cancer. Imagine that I have the cure for her cancer in my pocket. Ought I to give it to her? You do not have too many friends here, do you? Hopefully, in Canada the answer would be yes. What if she was a wealthy woman and what if when she died I inherited her estate, and I was a real Darwinian? What would I do then? I would keep it, would I not, to take the initial winnings from her estate and the later ones from marketing the cure. You can only get from the facts to the moral injunction if you import into the argument that to save life is good, and that did not come from the physical facts.

There is no use trying to found government policy upon physical facts. It always has a metaphysical background and base. We are not discussing it. These patients are in deep trouble because they have even lost the vocabulary to describe their own problem. The only solution we have ever found to guilt in the history of human kind involves remorse, confession, repentance, restitution, reconciliation, grace, justification. We may not like those words, but they are the only words that will get you out of what you all face just before you die. What are my duties? Is there a God? Am I going to see it? Of course, if Pascal's wager is worth it, surely Canada should take Pascal's wager and work it on that basis, not on the tacit atheism that is currently privileged.

The university is more subtle in Marxism. It does not say there is no God. It says we can behave as though there is no God. That is subtle and exceedingly dangerous. I have seen its impact on students over the last 30 years or more of teaching. It is frightening. That is why I do what I do now. It was the students who pulled me out of my comfortable ivory tower to do what I do now. More of that at the end of this lecture.

In discussing the mystery of marriage, then, we need a deeper foundation than appears to be used, certainly in the media. Marriage has been considered in many different ways, some of which have been mentioned this evening already. It has symbolic functions, contractual forms, procreative and relational forms, and for many, it has sacramental dimensions. It cannot be reduced to less than this. To discuss it just as a matter of equality or just as a matter of any one thing is indefensible intellectually. We have to do the much more difficult thing of holding these things in tension and seriously thinking about what will be for the flourishing of Canada.

In this talk, I want to deal with it in three sections: first, a discussion of the deeper philosophical and ethical issues, then some specifically medical concerns and, finally, some conclusions. I hope to be brief and not send you to sleep. If I do, I will creep out quietly and hope that you wake feeling better.

This bill is not a small matter. The question before us is not simply one of recognizing rights which truly exist and have been denied because there is a prior question. How are rights recognized, and what are their proper foundations? If a right can be established by a court or a Parliament, then the Nazis were rightfully able to kill Jews, but we all agree that is not so because there are deeper realities in courts and governments who are often wrong and create pseudo rights whilst taking away real ones. Real rights always have reciprocal responsibilities. Pseudo rights do not. It is one of the easy ways to make the distinction. You have a right to life because I, particularly as a physician, have a right and a duty to serve your life. You do not have a right to be killed because I have no duty to kill you, even on request, unless you wished me to be a physician without moral integrity, and no one wants a physician without moral integrity.

There are some physicians who have no belief in the ultimate meaning of life who could ethically and legitimately kill you. I frequently now give a lecture in some of the most ardently pro choice environments in North America on abortion. The lecture, which I have given at least 30 times now, always ends in dead silence. I have yet to have the first aggressive question because the issue facing us - all these things, abortion, same sex rights - are just not the deepest issue. The question you must always ask is this: Because law is founded in belief, what belief system would you need to have to logically arrive at this endpoint?

Do we as a nation have a duty to recognize same sex relationships as marriage? One cannot but feel sympathy for anyone who feels alienated from public acceptance, as is the case with homosexuals, but creating a right to call their relationships: marriage, requires rigorous thought rather than warm feelings. Creating such a right will necessarily have effects. Just as the physical world is consequential, so is the moral world. We all know that if we jump off a skyscraper, we are dead. When we make moral choices, they do not come disconnected from the whole of the rest of the moral universe. They are all interconnected, and that is what we must think about.

Creating such a right will certainly alienate those who would like to hold to the ancient definition of marriage and say: That is our word. Why can we not keep it? As has already been pointed out by the courts, only by removing the reproductive function can you extend the meaning of marriage to homosexuals, but the reproductive function is the only thing the state is legitimately interested in. It is a very strange irony, is it not, that what is proposed to ease the pain of perhaps a million homosexuals of whom no more than 10,000 will marry, if we take the Scandinavian experience as an example - if we extend that right, we will alienate about half of the population, 15 million or so, by taking away their perceived rights. Whether that is the case or not, that is the way they will see it. After all, that is the way the homosexuals have argued their case - how they feel.

This is hardly an easily defensible proposition democratically, nor is it a smart one politically. What is at stake has been foreseen and discussed by wise people for more than a generation. I want to mention two, because they do it with admirable precision. The first is a man called Arthur Leff. He taught common law at Yale for many years. He was worried about what was happening to lawyers in the 1970s. In 1979 he gave a spectacular lecture at Duke University on the nature and philosophy of justice. The opening is wonderful. I know of no one who can put the problem that faces us in Canada more clearly than this in one paragraph. He is an unbelieving Jew, as far as I can discover. He says: I want to believe and so do you in a complete immanent and transcendent set of propositions about right and wrong, findable rules that direct us as to how to live our lives righteously.

Obviously, being Jewish, he is talking about the Torah. Why does he want it? It is because, if the law is transcended from God, immanent and available to us, then justice is a possibility because justice and the person are under the same authority. However, Leff goes on. He lives in the 1970s. He says: But I also want to believe, and so do you, like most Canadians, in no such thing, but rather that we are wholly free to decide for ourselves what we ought to do and what we ought to do be. What we want, heaven help us, is to be simultaneously perfectly ruled and perfectly free. This is at the same time to discover the right and the good and to invent it. Even Canada cannot fudge that one. If you have the one, you do not have the other.

That is what we are facing in Canada. Which of those two models will dominate Canada? Are we on our own? Do we do it ourselves, or is there something beyond us? At the deepest level, is justice a discovery or is it an invention?

What Leff does next is something very unacademic. He writes 20 pages or more of lucid prose, weighing the pros and cons. You can find it in the Duke Law Review for 1979, if you want to read it. It is worth reading.

At the end he comes down on the Darwinian side of the argument. After all, social Darwinian in the 1970s was de rigueur in the academic environment. He says: It looks to me as though we are all that we have. There is no God, in other words. However, looking around the world and looking at ourselves, this is an extraordinarily unappetizing prospect. If brotherly love exists, the ruling model appears to be Cane and Abel. In the universities, I now have to explain who Cane and Abel were because the students do not know any more, as they are biblically illiterate. Canadian students no longer understand their own language because they do not recognize the metaphors of that language.

I was often asked to speak to medical students in frosh week, because I could interest them. I would say to them: You will be taught medicine on the bio psycho social model. As far as I am concerned, that model has been weighed in the balances and found wanting. My guess is that no more than one of you knows what I just said. There was usually one, and I usually knew who it was. Neither do you know what I said, unless you recognize the metaphor. The students thought that I had said that it was a few grams underweight. They were used to defective professors and they were smart; they could fix it themselves. The problem was that that was not what I said.

What should have come to their mind was Balthazar's feast. Balthazar had taken the sacred vessel of the Jews and profaned it for an orgy. In the middle of the orgy the hand starts to write on the wall, as the hand might be writing now on this wall. You, says Daniel to Balthazar, have been weighed in the balances and found wanting, and you will be dead and your kingdom will be gone in the morning. I was not saying that the bio psycho social model of medicine was a few grams underweight. I was saying that it was profanely and profoundly inadequate because it pretends to treat patients as though they are merely disordered machines, and we are not. Whether we like it or not, we are spiritual beings.

Leff understood all that. He went on and said: After Cane and Abel, neither reason nor love nor even terror has served to make us good. The reference to terror is a reference to Lenin, who wrote that in a letter within a very short period of starting the Russian revolution. He said: When we have got rid of God it will be necessary to legalize terror, because people have to be controlled. It did not work, and in the end it drove Russia
bankrupt.

I was in St. Petersburg not so very long ago lecturing at the university. It was an amazing experience because I gave an hour's lecture at about this time of day and the question period went for five hours, to midnight. When I asked one of the students what the biggest problem was with Marxism, she said that Marxism destroyed the meaning of the word: trust. We are moving in the same direction. It is very strange, is it not, that such a profoundly important social experiment as this is being dealt with by the courts and not by the people. That needs to be dealt with.

Leff goes on and says: Only if the law was unspeakable by us would it be unchallengeable, but as things stand now, everything is up for grabs. That is the beginning of the idea that is taught in many departments of the university now, that the law is not actually any more about justice. The law is about power. You will be taught that explicitly in women's studies, Black studies and queer studies. The law is about power, not about justice.

Quite clearly, that has happened with this bill. Every statistic shows that the vast majority of Canadians are not yet ready for this, at the very least, yet it is going ahead anyway, as though you, in some arrogant way, I must say, know better. Do you? That is what you have to think. One day you will give an account to the supreme judge for your decisions.

Leff cannot live with his own conclusions. Having got to that conclusion, he writes one more paragraph, which is a total non sequitur. He says: Nevertheless, napalming babies is wicked. Buying and selling each other is depraved. Starving the poor is wrong. There is in this world such a thing as evil. He just said there was not. He knew what he should do; he was well trained. If you have a technically correct argument and you arrive at an unsustainable conclusion, you must re examine the premise. Because every one of us has a desire for justice, we need something beyond ourselves. That is what Leff thought.

Justices without Leff's rigor based their assertion of a right of homosexuals to change the meaning of the word: marriage, on no visible intellectual foundations. They just invoked the Charter. The Charter is merely a piece of paper. Where is the argument? It is simply raw, judicial power. They ought to be open about this. Ordinary Canadians have a right to know how their justices decide these things, because justice is central to
our political existence.

Until recently, when the modern arrogance of unbridled individual freedom began to flourish, we understood ourselves as the guardians of a cultural history. We understood that we had a duty to hand on to our children the best of what had been given to us. I grew up in blue collar Birmingham, the equivalent of Detroit. My mother had no formal education, nor my father, but they were both very smart. My mother often spoke to women's groups across the City of Birmingham. We never had a car. She would often come home after dark. She could walk from the bus stop to our house for 10 or 15 minutes through the semi darkened streets of Birmingham just after the Second World War and my father never gave it a thought because there was no risk. Would any of the women here feel happy in any large city of North America alone at ten o'clock at night? Of course not.


That is what has happened. These things have not been passed on. I was made profoundly aware of this several few years ago when I was asked to give a lecture in the Prairies. If I had known how far from Winnipeg it was, I would probably have said no, but I did not. It was a Mennonite community. Being Mennonites, the food and music were good; I enjoyed the evening. I do not even remember what I spoke about. It was too late to go back to Winnipeg that night so the physician who had invited me took me to his home for the night. We drove into his garage, which he did not lock. We got out of the car, which he did not lock. He left the ignition key in the car. We went into the house and he pushed the door, which he did not lock, and said: It is late. Do you need anything? I said: No, but is not leaving the ignition key in the car going a little far? He shrugged and said: You never know who may need it.

The second person I wish to draw to the attention of senators is one of the greatest living philosophers, Mr. Alasdair McIntyre. He began as a Marxist and ended an atomist. He wrote: After Virtue, which is difficult to read but opens with a wonderful parable about us. In the book he says: I want you to imagine a know nothing government taking charge. Not difficult for many of us to understand, I am sorry to say. They decide that all of the problems in the world are due to science and scientists. The solution is simple: lynch the scientist, blow up the laboratories and burn the libraries and all will be well. Of course, all is not well. Having done it, they have to try to reinvent science. In so doing, they find it does not work. They can only poke around in the ruins and find the odd partial equation. They teach it as we teach science now, by rote. Students memorize it and dump it; they do not create intellectual structures in most cases worthy of a life. It is of no use because it is divorced from any overarching sense of what science is. McIntyre said that what he wants us to understand in this book is our problem not in relation to science but in relation to morality. We have no overarching structure of what it is. The book then proceeds to review western philosophical history,concluding that post-Plato, the last 300 years have been a dead end. The perorationat end of the book is fantastic when he suggests that if you have followed his argument, you will see that he is proposing that we are entering upon a second Dark Ages. But, we should not be entirely without hope because the last time this happened, good men and women withdrew from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium into the task of forming communities within which they could keep the civilities and the virtues alive; and they succeeded. The only difference is that the last time this happened the barbarians were waiting at the gate, and this time they have been ruling us for quite some time. It is the failure to appreciate this fact that is at the heart of our problem. We are waiting for a doubtless new St. Benedict. This has to be thought about because this is the issue.

In medical school there can be no agreement on abortion because there are fundamentally two different ways of understanding the issues. Half are tacit atheists and half believe in God. You cannot prove the non existence of God and I do not believe you can prove the existence of God. Both are acting upon faith, and we all do that. We behave as though there is or there is not a God of some kind. Reference is made to the Dao and to the Hindu writings or to the Koran or to the Old or New Testaments some kind of law. TheJews captured the essence of it all in one sentence when Moses said that each should do what is right in his or her own eyes. Some will call it Torah or Tao or natural law, but something like that is necessary. At the moment, we are trying to fudge it by not discussing it. However, it will bite us back if we do not deal with it. I do not know what the solution is. I suspect, for instance, that in medicine we need two medical systems. The rules for life are necessary. If you do not believe me, allow me to take to you eastern Congo where I spent many years. There are no rules there now and the things that are happening are beyond words. We need laws and rules, and they need to be enculturated.

There are demons just below the surface. The most extraordinary summer of my life was 1995 that I spent with the Hutu refugees. I will say two things only. The medical consequences and the consequences for children are essential. It is true that we do not have much data on children yet and for the most part, you need to ask someone who knows what they are doing whether you should read it. If it does not have a control group, is not randomized appropriately and if the confounding factors are not taken care of, put it in the blue box. I know of one from Australia that was recently published that dealt with these things. A Man who is pro homosexual took three groups: Homosexually parented, common law parented and heterosexually parented. There were 13 assessment points. The traditional parents scored first in nine, the homosexuals first in three and the common law parents were always last or second. We need substantial data on children. At the least we must set up some substantive and ongoing studies of what will come out of this. It will not be easy, but we have to do it. As well, we have to be concerned with is education. Having made same sex marriage equivalent to ordinary marriage, your children and grandchildren must be taught that this is normal sexuality; but it is not. Here is a list of the things that we have to deal with in homosexuals: a decreased likelihood of establishing or preserving a successful relationship; a decrease in life expectancy of 8 to 30 years; chronic potentially fatal liver disease; inevitably fatal immune disease HIV in many cases; frequent fatal rectal cancers or other cancers; multiple bowel problems; infections, the order of which is so great that they dominate the infectious diseases service at the General Hospital, although homosexuals comprise a small portion of the population of Ottawa; other medical problems; association with drug and alcohol abuse; and compulsive or risky sexual behaviour; and a low likelihood of its effects being eliminated

Senator Cools: You were listing medical consequences. Did you finish that?

Dr. Patrick: I listed most of them.

Senator Ringuette: Thank you Dr. Patrick. Some people will see this glass as half empty and others will see it as half full. When you say that the Canadian Charter is merely a piece of paper, I look at my glass and decide that I am lucky because it is half full. You see it as half empty. You talked about your mother. Was that in Birmingham, U.S.A. or Birmingham, U.K?

Dr. Patrick: It was in the U.K.

Senator Ringuette: My mother, who is French Canadian, is from New Brunswick. She has lived now for 88 years in a minority situation, both legally and spiritually, as a Catholic. It is fundamental that minorities recognized in our Charter be accepted as they are - as full fledged Canadians, nothing less. I guess that you need to have lived as a minority in order to understand other minorities - the importance and how Canada is great to have recognized that each one of us has the same rights, whether we are French or English, whatever is our skin colour, whatever is our ethnicity.

Senator Cools: Tell me about it right here in the Senate.

Senator Ringuette: Up until we had a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, I, as a French Canadian, could not attend French school. My 88 year old mother, because she was a French Canadian living in New Brunswick, did not even have access to a school or to a hospital in French. I take great pride as a Canadian in our Charter and I resent Dr. Patrick saying that my Charter, our Charter, your Charter is merely a piece of paper.

Dr. Patrick: That is what we are doing, is it not? We are using words and redefining them very easily at the moment. I would prefer common law because I think it is more fluid and it has more flexibility attached to it. That is not the issue here. I entirely agree with you that minorities need to be defended.

Senator Ringuette: That is what we are doing.

Dr. Patrick: People come to university to learn to discriminate. Everyone in this room has things they do not tolerate. The question is how you decide what you will not tolerate. All of you, hopefully, would not tolerate child abuse. You would not tolerate murder. You would not tolerate theft. There are lots of things we do not tolerate. Tolerance is a virtue but it is not top of the list; it is about 25th on the list.

There are all sorts of things that you have a duty to be intolerant of. Any attack on truth, any attack on children, any attack on life ought not to be tolerated. The problem, it seems to me, is that around the world at the moment it is the ordering of the virtues that is in trouble. I think, in this bill, it is the ordering of the virtues that is in trouble - which ones come first.

Senator Ringuette: There is no hierarchy of rights in Canada.

Dr. Patrick: There ought to be.

Some Hon. Senators: Oh, oh. There ought to be.

Dr. Patrick: Nobody tolerates the right of someone else to kill someone else.

The Chairman: You are all entitled to your own thinking. I will give you the floor, Senator Cools, so you can ask questions.

Senator Cools: I would like to thank Dr. Patrick for coming here today. I would like to say that every person faces grief and sorrow. We used to call this man's inhumanity to man. Some young people are persecuted and beat up or pressured because they are bright; some because they are dumb; some because they are pretty; some because they are ugly; some because they are Black; some because they are whatever. This is the mystery of the human condition that human beings hurt each other.

Dr. Patrick: It is.

Senator Cools: I take a fair amount of violation around this place and I take it because I am fundamentally different. I think differently. I think more. I also have my own view of racism in these places. Dr. Patrick, you have asked people here to think about things they have either not thought about or that they do not want to think about. Many senators may find what you are saying bothersome, troubling and provocative, but I am always willing and ready to hear provocative comment. I said to someone a few days ago, you know, I served under Allan J. MacEachen and Allan J. MacEachen was the type who would put out a view to you and then say: Tell me why I am wrong or where I am insufficient. It is the old British tradition of criticism and self criticism, which has disappeared from Parliament as Parliament has been converted into a voting machine where everybody is supposed to arrive and vote on a particular day, where the government seems to want little debate or, best of all, no debate at all. That is why we are here. I belong to that group of people who have been deeply concerned that this matter went to the courts before it came to us. If the Attorney Generalhad acted in the best public interest, he would have introduced a bill here rather than using the Supreme Court to begin a bill. They have used this language. You talk about the definitional corruption. Today, witness after witness sat here and talked to us about draft bills. Honourable senators, there is no room in our parliamentary system for a bill to begin in the courts. Every time that document was ever referred to as a draft bill, every member of Parliament should cringe, because our Constitution does not contemplate any role for any court in the introduction, production or creation of bills. A bill is an exclusively parliamentary thing. Whether it is the distortion of the word conjugation, whether it is a distortion of all the constitutional concepts - because I keep maintaining the weight of the Constitution has been to defend marriage I sincerely believe we could have accommodated every homosexual person without going down this route. I think, quite frankly, it is a travesty that it has happened.

I would like to come to the question. You have raised what nobody will talk about, the medical consequences of certain sexual practices. I would like to say to you that I was a lot younger then but when I first entered politics, I lost some of my strongest supporters to AIDS, homosexual people, strong supporters of mine and dear friends, and it broke my heart. This was in 1983, in the time when it was not even clear what AIDS was.

I have read a lot of literature. I have read Randy Schultz' book: After the Ball. I have gone after Larry Kramer's work, the great homosexual playwright, where all of these homosexual intellectuals were pleading that we look at these problems differently because somehow or other when the scourge called AIDS struck, it was not viewed as a communicable disease and it was shoved aside and treated in a very politically correct way rather than as a medical problem that should have been arrested and dealt
with. That has bothered me deeply. I think is a terrible disservice to my own homosexual friends, of whom I have many, and it hurts me that some people want to portray me as a bigot.

What has hurt me very deeply is that this entire debate has moved ahead without any proper discussion of the moral issues, the spiritual issues, the metaphysical issues or even the history of the law of marriage.

Dr. Patrick: I could not agree with you more.

Senator Cools: It has bothered me because this is not what Parliament is supposed to do. Parliament, not the courts, is supposed to be that grand institution, that grand inquest of the nation where all of the issues can be canvassed and where we can hear witnesses on all of the issues. The courts are not qualified, quite frankly, to handle these issues. If you were to read through all the decisions of the courts there is not a word about human sexuality. There is not a word about children. There is not a word about the consequences for homosexual people themselves. We hear a few homosexuals saying: We really need this so much to make ourselves feel happy. Well, marriage is not the good housekeeping stamp of approval. It is something far deeper than that.

Dr. Patrick: It is precisely these issues that seem to matter.

Senator Cools: You have asked senators to think. That is a dangerous thing to do. You are a professor, and should know that.

Dr. Patrick: That is my job.

Senator Cools: Asking people to think is dangerous.

Dr. Patrick: I have spent a lot of my time with children in Africa over the last 20 to 25 years. I saw more AIDS in Central Africa than I had on my first visit to Soweto in the mid 1980s. In fact, they had seen their first case the year before. I was there recently. Doctors in Soweto now wear triple gloves. I could take you to clinics in Tugela Ferry in KwaZulu Natal where there are two 20 bed wards full of people who will be dead of AIDS in the next six weeks. Young residents are writing death certificates on people their own age. Twenty per cent of the students in Medunsa medical school will die of AIDS, and we continue to propose condoms. Condoms have at least a 20 per cent failure rate under any real purposes, and when you have a 30 per cent prevalence rate, this is Russian roulette with three bullets in the chamber. It is ridiculous.

Senator Cools: I was going even deeper if I can say deeper than that. I have tried to figure out why it is that this debate will not bring forward any discussion on heterosexual unions or on homosexual unions. No one will tell us what these unions are. I have found your testimony stimulating, a little long, but that is okay. At least it does not invoke laughter from me, but I am used to invoking laughter from many on the other side. Intellect is desirable. I would also like to say, honourable senators because I have to do an interview in a few minutes that this chamber could do with a lot more intellectual stimulation.

The Chairman: Thank you for your judgment, Senator Cools.

Senator Prud'homme: On a point of order, I do not think it is fair to always point to this side and the other side. It happens to be that some senators on this side are undecided. It happens to be that some senators on the other side are of your view. Each one has his or her own ability. I would like this place to be different than the House of Commons where everyone says things that are irrelevant in the Senate, to be frank. It is very provocative.

The Chairman: I do not think we are here to insult anyone and we should not insult our colleagues. That is my feeling. Let us have a higher level of discussion, d'écouter et prendre part à ce genre de débat. Je n'attends aucune réponse de votre part.

The Chairman: It is almost 6:30. We will have to conclude our discussions for the day and try to find peace in our feelings. Thank you Dr. Patrick for your presentation and your contribution.

The committee adjourned.


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