Hon. Lillian Eva Dyck:

As a member of the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology, I would like to enter the debate. This is an important bill and I listened carefully to what Senator Keon said. Of course, when we hear about injuries to children it breaks all of our hearts and. Senator Andreychuk as well as Senator Carignan continued along that theme today.

Honourable senators, I looked carefully at the numbers in the report from the Public Health Agency of Canada, which comes from the Canadian Hospitals Injury Reporting and Prevention Program, and they are correct, they admit thousands of Canadian children up to 20 years of age who are injured. There were 29,142 emergency room visits, but only 290 of those, 1 per cent, were considered serious.

I am putting this in context. Every serious injury is important, but the risk is relatively small. I have asked my niece, who is a new mother of a five-month-old child, whether she had gone to the emergency room. I am sure every mother in this room has had an emergency room visit with her small children.

An Hon. Senator: And lots of fathers.

Senator Dyck: She had, but it was not serious.

We can raise issues, we can say they are important, but we should keep it within context. Of those injuries, 11,000 were due to falls from bunk beds; baby walkers have been banned; 3,600 were due to motor vehicle or traffic-related incidents, and so on. Therefore, the risk is small. We should not have any accidents, but in any society, kids will have accidents and hurt themselves. This bill will probably help in some ways, but one thing we have not discussed is consumer product alerts.

How did my niece know that she did not want to buy a Stork Craft baby crib? It was because she heard about it in the news. She saw all the reports in the newspaper. She said, "I am not stupid enough to buy one of those cribs. I know they are dangerous." She does not need Health Canada to rush in there and take all those products off the market because she has heard the news already.

Citizens are intelligent. We should do all we can to get those dangerous products off the market, but we should not have overreaching powers that endanger everyone and take away the rights of the individual citizen.

I am all for protecting children, I am all for protecting adults, but let us not go overboard. Let us not claim we are at great risk. Even Shawn Buckley, a witness at the committee asked if it is necessary for the government to have such a serious overarching reach into our homes and into our private offices.

In the case of something like anti-terrorism law, I could understand the need, because there is a serious and imminent danger, but if we are delayed by a few hours it is not putting children at such a risk that they will be dying off like flies.

We all very much want to protect consumers, but I do not think we need to take the measures that are taken in this bill.

Please click here to read the full exchange of this debate

Recent Statements from Liberal Senators