14 days: Rock's brave new world.

The Chretien government's proposed legislation on Assisted Human Reproductive Technologies, now under parliamentary review, is fated to have a more profound impact on democracy in Canada than Jean Chretien's other legacy, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Where the Charter governs the way we order our lives together, the new legislation would order life itself.

To honour its best intentions, the charter was inspired to contain the power of the state and, ultimately, prevent the recurrence of the horrors of human history: genocide, enslavement, and dehumanization. Its inspiration was to make totalitarian power impossible, affirming instead that Canada is founded on the "supremacy of God and the rule of law."

Ottawa's proposed bill on genetic and life technologies, drafted on the watch of Allan Rock, health minister and embryonic prime minister, is altogether a different beast. In the name of human dignity, which Mr. Rock has identified as the government's guiding principle, the bill industrializes human life, rendering it the raw material for the vastly lucrative technologies of the 21st century.

On the positive side, the legislation would ban cloning. However, the creation of chimeras or animal-human hybrids, and the embryonic stem cell research (the tool box of Josef Mengele, the Nazis' "angel of death,") would be a feature of Canada's brave new economy, as long as the chimeras and embryos were destroyed within 14 days of their coming into being.

Mr. Rock's proposed law would prohibit these technologies on one hand, only to arrogate total control over them to himself with the other, licensing them at will through back-room ministerial dispensations. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger is an authority on the ideas that kill civilizations. A German cardinal who survived Hitler, he is the Church's great coroner of pathological ideologies. Earlier this year he commented on the irony of ideas like Allan Rock's. "In a certain sense, Hitler somewhat anticipated modern developments like cloning and medical experimentation with human embryos," he wrote in the Italian newspaper La Stampa. He added, "It is terrifying that some of the powers, which over half a century ago defeated Nazism, today opt, in the scientific realm, for debatable and anti-human practices like cloning."

A brave new world is coming to Canada in slow motion, and it comes in the name of human dignity. This is not genocide, the "deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic or national group"; it is something larger. Our parliamentarians must contemplate the systematic redefinition of the human species itself.

Despite his best intentions, Mr. Rock's legislation would define humanity as we have known it out of existence, supplanting it with a new and lesser order of human being where we would be reduced to our sheer biological status as suppliers of genetic material; where our offspring at the most vulnerable phases of human existence would be at law nothing more than "organisms;" where technology would eclipse the supremacy of God in the creation and ordering of human life.

As is generally the case when major social upheavals are in motion, women, children, and minority groups will pay the heaviest price. In the words of the Holy See, "it is not permissible to use women as a source of ova for conducting cloning experiments." Women are not mechanical agglomerations of biological processes, and yet this ultimately is how they are treated in the proposed legislation.

The technologies advanced by Mr. Rock make it possible for some people, or regulatory agencies, or indeed corporations, to have total dominion over the existence of human beings. The body blow to human rights dealt by this draft bill is not in the least eased by the assertion that none of the embryos or chimeras would be brought to term, but would be killed after 14 days of existence. In the assessment of the Pontifical Academy for Life, any legislation that permits an embryo's destruction before birth, is "a cruel, exploitive way of treating human beings.

For all of this, Mr. Rock hit upon one of the founding principles of democratic society when he gave evidence before Parliament's Health Committee. "There must be a higher notion than science that can guide scientific research and endeavour," the minister reasoned. "Because we can do something does not mean that we must or should."

For the ancient Greeks the idea of democracy was intimately connected to the idea of life. Indeed, as the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben shows, the idea of life was for them so big they used two words to describe it. Zoe was the stuff of nature, the life in the womb, the blood in your veins. It belonged to God alone. Bios was their word for day-to-day living: keeping the markets open and honest, providing for the common defence, and ultimately the protection of life itself. This was the proper sphere and limit for politics.

Agamben argues that modern democracies have defeated Hitler but remain haunted by his odious personality. He gave the modern state its rapacious appetite for Zoe, the roots of life belonging to God. Mr. Rock's proposed bill would make this appetite seemly, just, and profitable.

Good women and men serve Canada on Parliament's Health Committee. We must pray for them and as citizens give them the benefit of our informed judgement. They, with Mr. Rock leading the way, must reclaim for Canada our best and ancient genius for democracy: Canada must keep for God what is God's alone. (+)

This article is an updated version of a Page one editorial that appeared in the Nov. 19 B.C. Catholic.

Michael Markwick is a doctoral candidate at the Simon Fraser University School of Communication.