Hiding abortion statistics - enhances openess and transparency

A while ago I wrote to my MPP about the changes to FIPPA that excluded abortion services.

Below is her response to me. Below that, is my latest letter in reply to her response.

Dear Ms. Meilleur,

Thank you for your September 20th response to my letter.

However you failed to answer my two questions.

Your letter does state that "the inclusion of hospitals under FIPPA is a strong indication of the Government's commitment to enhancing openness and transparency in the public sector."

You also mention that CIHI publishes Ontario statistics in their report and can be used for "research purposes", and that the changes "were debated" in the Legislature".

So in addition to my previous two questions I would like you to answer, I'd like to add three additional questions, based on your current letter to me.

3. Can you please explain how exempting abortion services from FIPPA "enhances openness and transparency in the public sector"?

4. I agree that CIHI publishes abortion statistics for Ontario. However CIHI's statistics are grossly under reported for numerous reasons including the fact that CIHI does not base their numbers on OHIP billings; abortions done in private physician's offices are not included; and many clinics do not report abortions performed. In fact CIHI's statistics for Ontario are understated by at least 45%.

Please see here for more accurate abortion statistics I did for 2010 based on OHIP billings.

Can you explain to me how someone doing research into Ontario's abortion statistics, would use information that is inaccurate?

5. You state that "These amendments were debated and passed in the Legislature." Can you please provide me with the links to Hansard where the abortion exclusion clause was debated in the Legislature?

I look forward to hearing back from you soon with answers to my five questions.

Sincerely,
Patricia Maloney

CIDA - when due diligence isn't diligent

(Updated Sept 30, 2013)

When the government spends our money, you'd think they'd know what they're spending it on, right? Wrong.

In my last entry on my ATIP to CIDA regarding the $6 million funding to IPPF for the five countries Afghanistan, Mali, Tanzania, Bangladash and Sudan, I told you that IPPF was supplying the contraceptive drug Jadelle to Tanzania. (Note that CIDA is now part of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada)

I knew this because Jadelle was identified in the semi-annual yearly report I received, as being used (in Tanzania). In fact it was the only drug identified in the report. I thought well, what other kinds of implants, contraceptives etc., are they using? Don't we want to know that too?

Time for another ATIP.

Based on my previous ATIP which yielded the semi-annual and annual progress reports, were a list of  "Approved Activities", along with units delivered for each activity, and what the targets were.

For example, for oral contraceptives, 830,552 services were delivered in Year 2 (1 April - 30 Sept 2012), with the target for the year being 1,663,868, and with a target of 5,199,995 for the entire duration of the project.

Other "Approved Activities" that caught my eye ,were 1121; "sterilization services", item 1124, "gynaecological services"; item 1128, "other SRH medical services"; item 1211 "family planning services"; item 1221, 1222 and 1223, "develop/produce/deliver Behavior Change Communication  material"; item 1323: "injectables"; item 1324, "implants"; and item 1325: "other hormonal methods".

So I sent another ATIP, and asked to see a further breakdown of these activities, for example, what kinds of contraceptives were they delivering, and how many of each kind? And, for the "other SRH medical services", what kind of "other SRH medical services", and their breakdown by numbers, for each different category of service, and so on for each of the above services.

How do we know they aren't sneaking in abortion services into that category, or giving advice to a woman to obtain an abortion? We don't. Not unless we can see the breakdowns.

Guess what I received? Nothing. The response I received was:

"Please be advised that after a through search of our file, no records related to your request exist."

This was a huge surprise, especially since the contribution agreement (received through another ATIP) states that the Annual Workplan will contain "A list of equipment and materials to be purchased with CIDA's contribution."

I was looking for that list of equipment and materials. But nothing existed? How could that be? One would assume that the program area would have this information in order to satisfy the terms of the funding agreement, n'est pas? When I talked to the director involved in the ATIP area of CIDA, his response was that since CIDA didn't hold those records, there was nothing he could to to help me. He followed up or discussion with an email that said this:

"the Department's Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) office can only provide records which already exist at the time of the request and since the legislation only applies to the Government of Canada, we cannot and do not request documents from third parties. Further, this office is not able to provide information on the content of the records, which are produced by program officials. The former Canadian International Development Agency's ATIP office provided you with records regarding this project and as your inquiry below is more in the nature of a policy question, we discussed that questions regarding programs and program/project management are more properly addressed in correspondence to the Minister responsible."

But how can CIDA satisfy it's due diligence responsibility, if they don't insist that the organization to which they dole out our money, informs CIDA exactly how our money is being spent?

So I contacted the Minister, Christian Paradis:

"I have requested a series of access to information requests from CIDA, regarding the$6 Million funding given to International Planned Parenthood.

My latest request yielded a response that "no records relate to your file exist".

...The numbers identified in the semi-annual and annual reports I did receive, are at a very high level and are only a summary report. These numbers do not constitute the due-diligence required to provide the level of detail that I requested in my ATIP.

The contribution agreement states that the Annual Workplan will contain "A list of equipment and materials to be purchased with CIDA's contribution." I am looking for this breakdown of these materials as noted in my ATIP.

...The program area should have this information in order to satisfy the terms of the funding agreement. And since taxpayers are the source of this funding, this information should be readily available to Canadians like myself. This is the information I am seeking with this ATIP request.

Here is Mr. Paradis' office short and sweet response to my question:

"Unfortunately, I am unable to provide you with any detailed numbers identified in the semi-annual and annual reports."

So how is our money being spent? And is it being used for abortion services? Why doesn't CIDA know? And why doesn't Mr. Paradis know?

Lots of questions. Not too many answers.

MP Maurice Vellacott speaks out

MP Maurice Vellacott sent this letter to Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada (the old CIDA) regarding the drug Jadelle which we Canadians are paying for. A drug that isn't good enough for Canadians, but apparently just fine for Tanzania.

 

I'm looking forward to hearing Mr. Rochon's response.

 

----------------------------

 

September 26, 2013

Paul Rochon

Deputy Minister of International Development
Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada
200 Promenade du Portage
Gatineau, Quebec K1A 0G4
Fax: 819-953-3352

Dear Mr. Rochon,

The accompanying report provides evidence that Canadian foreign affairs bureaucrats have approved the use of Canadian taxpayer dollars to the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) for a project that administered the sterilization drug Jadelle (Norplant-2) to Tanzanian women. Jadelle (Norplant-2) was developed by the Population Council.

Norplant-2 is not available in Canada. It is also not marketed in the United States, where Pfizer spent millions of dollars to settle a lawsuit with thousands of women over alleged harm caused by the contraceptive implant.

Canadian foreign affairs officials have funded this drug to be distributed to Third World women, when it is viewed as harmful to North American women, and therefore not marketed in Canada or the US.

Besides the drug’s threat to women’s health, it is also highly unlikely that women in Tanzania were given adequate information about the drug to provide truly informed consent for the implant.

If the drug companies can't make Jadelle available in Canada and America, due to negative health repercussions for women here, why the double standard? Why is it good enough for women in Third World countries, especially when this is contrary to the goals and aims of our government’s maternal health commitment?

Our government made a strong commitment in 2010 to prioritize foreign aid funding to projects that contribute to maternal, newborn and child health. The information about sterilizing Tanzanian women with this troubling drug is found in an annual progress report on a 2013 project, and was uncovered by Canadian researcher Pat Maloney.

This report would indicate, then, that these foreign affairs bureaucrats are pursuing an agenda at odds with the Canadian public and with our government’s stated priorities. They are failing in the due diligence we expect from them when allocating Canadian funds to foreign aid projects.

There needs to be greater oversight of these foreign affairs employees, and their allocation of taxpayer dollars, to ensure that all their activities are consistent with our government’s priorities before we allocate further funding to them.

I am sending a copy of this letter to the Foreign Affairs Minister, and although it did not happen under his watch, I know he'll be rightly upset at this blatant undermining and sabotage of our Government's good international initiatives to improve maternal and child health in developing countries.

 

Yours sincerely,

 

Maurice Vellacott, MP
Saskatoon-Wanuskewin

Cc. Hon. John Baird, Minister of Foreign Affairs

Exposing "Exposing Crisis Pregnancy Centres in BC"

The two Crisis Pregnancy Centres in BC recently lost their defamation case against Joyce Arthur for her report "Exposing Crisis Pregnancy Centres in BC."

Their press release states:

"As stated in his legal argument to the court at paragraph 18 "The defendants' position in this application is that as a matter of law the impugned passages in the report are not capable of being found to refer to the plaintiffs, and in any event, as a matter of fact the report would not lead a reasonable person who knows the plaintiffs to conclude that the passages refer to them"; and at paragraph 20 "... no reasonable reader of the report would feel able to draw any conclusions about the practices at the CPCs operated by the plaintiffs" (i.e. the Vancouver and Burnaby centres).

The Judge who heard legal argument on this matter in early April ultimately accepted those submissions, stating at paragraph 92 of her reasons for judgement, released on August 26th, that "As it is never made clear in the Report what 'many or most' entails with regard to CPCs across North America, it is difficult to say the 'deceptive' tactics reflect personally on the plaintiffs. The impugned statements do not have any specificity; the Report describes the tactics in broad generalizations." And then her conclusion at paragraph 98, that "I conclude the alleged defamatory statements are not of and concerning the plaintiffs."

The Crisis Pregnancy Centres are obviously confused by this ruling, since as they so aptly point out, the report:

• Is titled Exposing Crisis Pregnancy Centres in British Columbia, and which title appears typed at the top on all 65-pages of the report, including the pages where the Allegations appear.
• Describes its purpose as: "We wanted to find out what these centres were doing and saying to women in BC, and whether they were engaging in deceptive or harmful practices."
• Lists the Vancouver and Burnaby Centres in an appendix to the report along with, and only, CPCs in BC.
• Focuses most of the content (main text and appendixes) specifically on CPCs in BC (including our own CPCs).

But there is another reason that this ruling is troublesome. It is because of the very nature of the research itself, that was conducted for the report.

By her own admission, Arthur's research included using a volunteer to infiltrate CPCs in BC, by sending out surveys, by phone calls and by visits. All these activities were done of CPCs in BC, not to CPCs in anywhere else in North America. How could Arthur know that those activities and strategies are common to "many or most" CPCs throughout North America like she states? Other than a couple of footnotes, all of Arthur's hands on research was done in BC. Not anywhere else.

In fact, for Arthur's statement that "many or most” of 4000 US centres behave badly, she only has a few isolated footnotes about what a few of them do. How on earth can she generalize from a few bad apples to the majority? Almost certainly pure speculation.

The question that arises about this research is this. What are vague allegations about US centres, doing in a report about BC centres, other than to imply that what Arthur alleges is true of the US centres, is also true of the BC centres?

That is the implication readers will take from her report – that BC Centres do these bad things too. Is this what Arthur intended all along?

(See below for a list of my previous writings on this subject. They discuss some other interesting fun facts about the report. Like how Arthur's Pro Choice Action Network received $27,400 in a government grant from Status of Women Canada to write the report. And how PRO-CAN never publicly acknowledged that grant like they were supposed to.)

(This was first published on LifeNews in January 2010)
Supporting Women in Canada Means Educating That Abortion Hurts Women

Apr 05, 2010
Status of Women Canada pays extreme group to discredit CPCs

April 16, 2010
"pregnancy support groups" vs "crisis pregnancy centres"

April 27, 2010
Mr. Harper must support the abortion debate

June 25, 2012
Don't let the numbers fool you

(First published in LifeCanada's Journal)
Jan 06, 2013
Joyce Arthur's Pro-Can grant: an investigation, Part I
Mar 09, 2013
Joyce Arthur's Pro-Can grant: an investigation, Part II

Supporting Women in Canada Means Educating That Abortion Hurts Women

(This was first published on LifeNews in January 2010)

Canada, unlike the United States, has no abortion laws. The abortion law we did have was struck down in 1988 by the Supreme Court of Canada when challenged by Dr. Henry Morgentaler, an abortion doctor.

Our Court declared in that ruling, that the existing law violated a woman's right to "security of the person" under section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This ruling had to do with procedural problems related to Therapeutic Abortion Committees where a panel of doctors had the authority to grant a woman a certificate to obtain a legal abortion if they felt continuation of the pregnancy would be harmful to the woman's health. The court did not rule that the Charter granted a "right to abortion". Since then, all attempts to create any legal abortion restrictions, have failed.

As Americans debate publicly funded abortions, they should take note that in Canada, all abortions are paid for by our public health care system. And because Canada has no abortion laws at all, abortion is legally permissible up until the moment of birth, and for any reason.

The only recourse pro-life Canadians have against abortion, is education. This includes education that comes from crisis pregnancy centres (CPCs).

CPCs are organizations that provide support and information to pregnant women who choose to keep their unborn child or decide to give the child up for adoption. These centres are alternatives to abortion clinics, both for the support they provide and for the information they give. These centres don't just help women who choose to give birth, but even those who haven't made a decision yet whether to abort or not. Many of these centres also help women who have already had abortions and are grieving.

Now these centres (CPCs also exist in the US) are under attack as radical feminist organizations try to maintain their any-time, any-reason, publicly funded access to abortion.

Recently one such organization, the Pro-Choice Action Network (Pro-Can), decided to go on the offensive against CPCs, resulting in a scathing report condemning these centres in British Columbia, Canada.

All right minded people need to ask themselves an extremely important question in light of this report.

Should pregnant women be able to get support and information from an organization that does not advocate abortion? I am not asking if we should support a pro-life philosophy. I am asking if women, in a free and democratic society, can choose to go to an organization that will not advocate abortion?

Pro-Can believes the answer is no and tries hard to get you to agree with them. They believe we must "beware" these organizations, that they "mistreat" and "deceive" women and give them misinformation". Based on what you ask? Well, lots of unsubstantiated claims, innuendo and anonymous sources. What evidence is provided, can easily be refuted with other evidence.

Pro-Can's so-called research project, "Exposing Crisis pregnancy centre's in British Columbia" states that these centres are "fake clinics" and that they are "anti-choice Christian ministries" that "often pretend to be non-biased medical clinics".

But these centres are not fake--they tell women they do not provide abortions and are not medical clinics (see Appendix 3 of report for individual centres' websites).

Pro-Can "infiltrated" some CPCs, by sending in a volunteer, and visiting or calling a number of them. The report also tries to discredit a volunteer manual obtained from the Canadian Association of Pregnancy Support Services (CAPSS), an umbrella organization for some of these centres.

Here are just three examples of how Pro-Can attempts to disparage these CPCs.

First, they refute the relationship between abortion and breast cancer (ABC). One reference used is based on a 2003 National Cancer Institute symposium that concluded there was no link. Yet that same symposium had dissension. One participant stated he was "convinced that the weight of available evidence suggests a real, independent, positive association between induced abortion and breast cancer risk."

See Joel Brind's (Ph.D., Professor, Human Biology and Endocrinology) full statement here.

Here are other studies that support the ABC link.

Second, when can a fetus feel pain? Pro-Can's report states that a fetus "cannot feel pain until at least the third trimester". However Dr. K.S. Anand, the world's foremost authority on research into pain perception in fetal and neonatal children and whose landmark study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1987, disagrees. At the Partial Birth Abortion hearings in the Southern District of New York in 2004, Dr. Anand testified that "the human fetus possesses the ability to experience pain by 20 weeks of gestation, if not earlier, and the pain perceived by a fetus is possibly more intense than that perceived by term newborns or older children." His testimony can be found here.

 

Dr. Paul Ranalli, a Toronto Neurologist, in a public information meeting in Toronto, Canada in October 2008, sponsored by The deVeber Institute for Bioethics and Social Research, also presented compelling evidence that fetal pain can be felt by 20 weeks and possibly earlier. I challenge the reader to listen to Dr. Ranalli's presentation and not have serious doubts about the "no pain until the third trimester" assertion.

Third, the report states "there is no evidence to suggest that women who have abortions experience any more or less sadness and regret than women who complete an unwanted pregnancy". They cite the American Psychological Association (APA) as one source. However Andrea Mrozek, manager of research and communications at the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada, details in a recent report that the APA research was flawed.
Here is additional research of the after affects of abortion here and here.

Some may say, "some of that research is biased". The same can and should be said of Pro-Can's evidence. That's why it's so important if there's the slightest possibility of the ABC link; or of severe psychological and physical health risks; or that her unborn child would suffer extreme pain during that abortion–that a pregnant woman see all the evidence, not just the "pro-choice" evidence. It's called informed consent. (Unfortunately Canada does not have informed consent laws for abortion.)

Canada has numerous abortion clinics, hospitals and Planned Parenthood organizations, to provide or refer for abortion services. That's ample pro-choice "help". Women want and deserve something other than abortion clinics. CPCs are the only concrete something else Canada has at the moment for women in crisis pregnancy situations. They provide information on abortions; they just won't provide or refer for the actual abortions. What they do provide, is support and information to help women make an informed decision in a nonjudgmental and loving way.

Finally, what about some of those Christians who work at CPCs? Here's what Pro-Can says in their newsletter about pro-life Christians: their "opposition to abortion comes primarily from religious justifications for oppressing women"; their "views seem small-minded, uninformed, sexist, and cruel"; they are "expressing disrespect and contempt for women." (Read more of Pro-Can's "commentary" and decide its credibility for yourself here and here.)

Nobody is asking Pro-Can to believe in Christ--but it's none of their business if others do. This is one of Canada's most precious rights. It's called freedom of religion and it is protected under our Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

There are no legal restrictions on abortion in Canada; no medical reason required; all paid for by taxpayers. Canada does not legally protect its most defenceless and vulnerable citizens. But if a woman decides to have her baby or if she's not sure yet what she wants to do, she can turn to a Crisis Pregnancy Centre for support and information she will not obtain at an abortion clinic or Planned Parenthood or Pro-Can.

Yes, we must beware organizations that mistreat and deceive women by giving them misinformation. This is why we must support a woman's choice of visiting and using crisis pregnancy centres.