Bill 30 - Alberta Evidence Amendment Act, 2008
October 28, 2008 - Second Reading
Ms Blakeman: Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I’m pleased to speak in Committee of the Whole to Bill 30, the Alberta Evidence Amendment Act, 2008. There have been a fair number of my colleagues that have commented on this bill, I think all of them favourably, because this is just one of those good ideas that as soon as you look at it, you think: yep, that’s where we need to go.
Just for anyone that hasn’t been following along, this essentially is allowing people to make an apology without it carrying a legal liability along with it. It actually prohibits the legal liability from coming with it, so it would allow someone to be able to apologize, to show concern or compassion, to say, “I’m sorry this happened to you,” without that apology then having a legal import and being used in a court of law to determine fault or liability or responsibility.
There have been a number of statistics that were quoted by my colleagues and by members opposite to show that often offering an apology would either reduce the number of lawsuits that were brought forward or actually reduce the amounts that people were seeking as pain and suffering compensations or would reduce the amount that people were willing to accept.
I would like to think that this is us veering back towards a more humane society. I think there’s actually a lot of evidence to contradict me when I say that. I know there’s quite a popular movie out in the movie theatres right now about how rude people are to each other.
Mr. MacDonald: That doesn’t happen in here.
Ms Blakeman: Oh, yes, it does. But that’s part of what our society is now. I think we have lost some of our humanity, and I think this bill takes a little tiny step towards restoring that.
The other piece of this that I found interesting. When I was the health critic I used to have fairly regular correspondence with an individual out of Calgary who was really promoting the idea of no fault findings in medical problems, medical suits, well, just medical issues that had come up, medical incidents. The feeling was that if we adopted the same approach as they had in the airline industry – that was a new industry. When they started it, they said: “Okay. Listen. We’re not going to get into a big debate about whose fault it was. We’re not going to spend all of our time saying who’s to blame so we can pin it on them. We’re not going to assign fault. We are going to spend all of our time trying to figure out what went wrong and then fix it so it doesn’t go wrong again.”
This individual and others that I’ve heard from along the same vein – and I agree with them – point out that they’ve been able to go a lot further in that airline travel industry to actually getting to the bottom of what the problems are and fixing them. If we were to have used a model more like that in the health sector, we would have been able to get to the bottom of a lot more reasons why things go wrong. There’s a phrase that’s used: adverse incidents, adverse effects. Those are the two phrases that you hear used in connection with things going wrong in the health sector.
This bill and the ability to apologize can be used in the context of a medical tragedy or accident. I think it would be interesting if we could take this a step forward and start to explore some parts of where we could take that no-fault idea – that’s what’s inherent in this, that we’re not saying who’s at fault; we’re just allowing people to apologize – and take it that one more step into the investigation of adverse incidents in the medical field in the same way that they’ve done it with airline travel.
They’ve certainly been very successful at getting to the bottom of where things go wrong, whether it was in a particular kind of wiring, in a particular kind of insulation that tended to catch on fire and cause planes to crash, or hitting geese on the runway and all kinds of other reasons. They understand what goes wrong and what causes tragedy in that area, and they have been able to work towards fixing the problems that they’ve discovered much more effectively in many ways than we have in the medical sector because what we end up with there is more about protectionism.
I didn’t mean to go on quite that long. I apologize for that because this is a good bill, and we really just wanted to pass it.
Dr. Taft: We won’t hold your apology against you.
Ms Blakeman: Thank you.
Thank you for being able to speak to the anticipated effect of this bill in committee. We don’t have any amendments that we want to bring to it. We just want to support the bill. Thank you very much.
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