Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to members of the committee for inviting me to appear.

I am a sociologist. In brief, I support this bill. I think it's an important piece of potential law that we could pass in Canada to tackle this problem.

I'm going to focus my remarks on my 2016 publication called “Generating Ambivalence: Media Representations of Canadian Transplant Tourism”. This is in an open-access journal called Studies in Social Justice. There's a link to it on page 6 of your legislative summary.

In this research project, I sought to understand why there was not more public pressure to stop Canadian participation in the organ trade despite a robust anti-transplant-abuse movement.

What I did was analyze mainstream Canadian media. I found that the media generate ambivalence towards the issue of transplant tourism, first by absolving Canadians of responsibility and second by consistently orienting public attention away from knowing and thinking about health outcomes and human rights, especially for organ providers. The anti-transplant-abuse movement has had to overcome that kind of mainstream public messaging that we find in the mainstream media.

In my study, I included print and online newspaper, films, TV documentaries and books. The earliest mention I found was in 1988 and sources went to 2015.

This is secondary research. The premise of the study is that the mainstream media shape public attitudes and thus public policy. I used a post-colonial theoretical lens to analyze the data.

My findings were from 233 articles over this 27-year period, most from 2004 to 2009. The articles tended to be sensationalist.

Then I did a deeper qualitative analysis of 74 articles, they included those on six Canadian transplant tourists, with mention of two brokers operating out of Canada. The pattern in the dataset, based on mainstream media, was one of gross imbalance.

Organ transplant providers are invisible in these stories. The public learns very little to nothing about live organ sellers or potentially coerced deceased donors. We are not invited to stand in their shoes and think about their journey. When health outcomes and human rights were mentioned, it tended to be in an isolated passage within a sentence with an overall narrative of sensationalism, one that was oriented around the buyer.

Transplant tourists are centre stage in the narratives of what Canadians learn about this practice. We hear about them and read about them as heroes in a survival story narrative of a dangerous journey, which is presented with empathy. Their actions are cast as morally wrong but understandable, difficult, relatable and even rational and necessary. Buyers are compelled to take radical action.

The public are invited to stand in those shoes and to gain that knowledge about what it's like to be that potential recipient with the challenges they face. Transplant tourists are presented in the mainstream media as innocent victims, compelled to travel and take risks, innocent because they are ignorant and “don’t know” why or how the organ provider is able to give that organ. They are also sometimes presented with this narrative of reciprocity and how it's a fair exchange, as if an organ and money are commensurable objects.

Buying an organ is also presented as being understandable because of the narrative of organ scarcity, so transport tourism is presented in mainstream media as a symptom of another problem for which Canada is to blame and is also the solution. We must solve the larger national organ scarcity problem, and then that would solve the transplant tourism problem. This is another way of constructing transport tourists as victims of long wait-lists.

I argue, having studied this topic for 20 years, that there's no evidence that the shortage will ever end and that this is a deflection from the concerns around human rights and health outcomes, especially for organ providers. The mainstream media eclipse public discussion of whether and how to stop Canadians from buying organs in other countries. Imbalanced narratives generate one-sided knowledge and empathy and absolve responsibility for health outcomes and human rights.

That is the messaging the transplant abuse movement has had to overcome.

One notable exception from that movement that does this very well is Rama Rau's 2010 independent film called The Market. It's unlike every other mainstream media piece. In this story, a B.C. woman on dialysis travelled to India.

What's unique is that she actually met the kidney seller. She saw the radically unequal standard of living between them, and the life chances, and after getting to know the seller said no. She did not proceed with the transplant. She returned home to dialysis. The only challenge, though, is that the public does not have access generally to that film.

Thank you.

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