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Bill 46 Gunshot and Stab Wound Mandatory Disclosure Act

Ms Blakeman:

Thanks very much, Mr. Speaker. I was in on part of the development of this, unfortunately, because it flowed out of the health information review that was done in the early part of this decade, let me put it that way. I don’t remember the exact date. Maybe 2003.

At the time there was a presentation from several of the large urban police forces that they wanted a clause inserted into the Health Information Act. They felt that it was urgent that they be able to compel medical personnel to alert the police force and, actually, to allow the police force to sort of troll through the hospital wards looking for people.

I really objected to that at the time because I felt it wasn’t the job of health professionals to enable the police officers who, you know, hadn’t hit their quota for the month to wander up and down the halls looking for people who would match outstanding warrants for particular problems.

It was put to us that, you know, there was urgency for this. I said: what urgency? They’re not in hot pursuit. If they were, there’s legislation to allow them to take certain actions. They’re clearly not looking for children that are at risk, because there’s legislation that would cover that. They’re also not looking for seniors who are at risk, because, again, there was legislation that would cover that.

The argument was: well, you know, we get these bad guys, and they end up in the hospital, and we need to be able to find out whether they’ve committed crimes, and there are other people, perhaps, who might be in need to track this down. And I said: well, then do what other jurisdictions have done and actually bring in a gunshot and stab wound act which would give clear direction as to what was expected of medical personnel because you are changing their relationship.

Frankly, we don’t train our medical personnel with a cop’s checklist of what kind of information and observations they’re supposed to be making about people. We train them to identify and triage the difficulty of a particular medical problem and to pursue treatment for that. The Member for Edmonton-Strathcona is correct. The bill did go partway towards what I had expected it to do but fails to give us the clarity that we were seeking.

You know, if we’re going to start crossing and blurring those lines between what we expect our professionals to do, you need to be addressing that through some sort of college or professional association, not doing it through some kind of legislation. I expect that clarity in there. If you are going to be messing around with people’s personal information, particularly personal health information, you’d better be pretty clear about exactly what the parameters are. This bill has failed to accomplish that to the degree that I expected it to to address this particular problem. I can give some inkling to the previous speaker of what kind of information they’ll be looking for because some of it was the information they were trying to get under the Health Information Act.

They wanted to know the location of the individual, their current home address, their social insurance number, their health care card, their appearance, obviously their contact information, location information, but also a lot of details about the medical condition that the person was in, which I feel is inappropriate. If you’re trying to chase down a bad guy for some reason, you know, you may well be able to present an argument to me about why you need their location information, but their medical information, I would argue, should not be part of that.

You know, it’s so frustrating to me that this government, with all of the resources that it has, having been in power for as long as it’s been, having control over everything it’s got control over, still manages to give us half-assed bills.

Sorry. I’m not supposed to use language like that, and I apologize for that. It’s not well done. It’s disappointing, but you know what? It’s also a cost factor. When you don’t give clarity in legislation, you wind up with a big old mess, and big old messes cost money. It costs money for somebody to clean it up, or it costs money for someone to fix it.

That’s what bugs me. We have this government that proclaims that it’s, you know, fiscally responsible, yet every time I look up, we’ve got another piece of legislation in front of us that either cannot explain how it is spending taxpayers’ money, cannot explain what benefit it is expecting to get from foregone revenue, or just creates a big old mess that costs money for taxpayers to clean up. That’s why I get annoyed with you. You should be able to do better with the resources that you’ve got.

Thanks.