Ms Cindy Wasser:

I would be happy to send that later to save the committee time. It was done in April 2020.

The other question asked was on the declaration. In my written submission, I went through some of the history and why the changes were made. Initially, provinces with the authority to declare who was a parent, through birth registration, required all birth mothers to declare themselves as mothers. Historically, they required them to declare who the father was. Over time, of course, we came to recognise that women were raped and that they conceived as a result of aggression. We realised that forcing them to name fathers who carried out criminal acts that led to the conception of children whom the law at the time did not allow to be terminated was just horrendous and, therefore, the law was changed such that the mother did not have to name a father.

This then created a problem at the other end. There were legitimate fathers who found that, because of an angry family-law dispute, they were not being declared the fathers of their children, although that had been the intent. I am referring to where a child was conceived with intent. Those affected needed to have a way to go to court and say they wanted to be the fathers, so the courts created a process for it. There were also situations where a woman may have named a father who never had an intention of having child and did not even know he had been a father. He needed an opportunity to come before the court and say he did not know about the matter and that there was an agreement, such as a promise by the woman to use birth control. The judge was left to decide based on evidence before the court whether the person had an intention to parent or not and declare in that person's favour or otherwise. We were able to use that process when surrogacy developed to say the surrogate could actually be declared not to be a parent, giving the intended parents the positive right and making a negative declaration regarding who is not a parent. This just adds a little more strength, even though the relationships are beautiful. Frankly, the surrogate is happy not to be declared a parent as well in Canada. That is how the process developed, and then the provinces started developing the administrative processes that set out that if one has the agreement and legal advice, with a statement that the parents will be the parents, one does not even need to go to court. The surrogate will sign off agreeing to it, stating a desire not to be named a parent. Birth recognition would ensue retroactively.