Ted Hsu

[Jobs, Growth and Long-Term Prosperity Act, May 10th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague talked about the CFI program. It is, indeed, a good program, but the problem that we have had for many years now is that we need funds to operate the infrastructure that we buy. We need to train technical people. That is why there was a program called the MRS program at NSERC, but that was just frozen. It has ended. There is no new money allotted for places like the Brockhouse Institute. Neutron scattering groups will be losing their MRS funding so they will not have the money to use the infrastructure that we have. That is a problem.

Why did the government choose to cut that money?

[Jobs, Growth and Long-Term Prosperity Act, May 10th, 2012]

Madam Speaker, the hon. member for Kitchener Centre spoke about the Conservative government's having paid down debt from 2006 to 2008, before the recession began.

I know why the hon. member said that. In 2006, the government inherited a budget that was in large surplus, which it had inherited from the previous Liberal government.

Why did the hon. member end his period in 2008? It is because his Conservative government put the federal budget into deficit. As he said, that was before the recession began.

It is funny how government members can spin facts to make them sound good, when what they really do is explain how the government has mismanaged the fiscal matters of this country.

[Jobs, Growth and Long-term Prosperity Act, May 8th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, humanity has always relied on innovation, ingenuity and hard work, the kind that I see a lot of among my colleagues, to move forward and create economic growth where there were no natural resources. We can see examples of that in the Asian tiger economies, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, all the places where investments were made in people, knowledge and innovation to encourage certain industries to prosper. They succeeded, and we need to do that. Not every part of Canada is rich in every natural resource and we need to remember that as we think about how to move Canada's economy forward and improve the productivity of our people.

[Jobs, Growth and Long-term Prosperity Act, May 8th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, the member mentioned billions of dollars being spent on research and development. Yes, money is being spent on research and development, but it is really being targeted at industry academic partnerships at the expense of basic research. That was the point I wanted to make in my speech.

I want to answer the member's question about the recommendations of the Jenkins report and replacing tax credits and the scientific research and experimental development tax credit by more direct grants. Reforms needed to take place in the SR&ED program. I disagree with some of the recommendations in the Jenkins panel report, for example, the recommendation to exclude the eligibility of capital expenditures from the tax credit. Some of the direct grant programs are quite good. The reputation of IRAP is very good. The industrial technology advisers have really good knowledge of the region that they are supposed to cover and, as far as government granting goes, are pretty good allocators of capital.

That is a good idea to discuss. We can talk about the details. There are some good things and there are some things that could be improved. It would be a good thing if the government would allow members of Parliament to make these suggestions, take them seriously and—

[Jobs, Growth and Long-term Prosperity Act, May 8th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I do agree. There is a good example of that in Canada, which is canola. The research on canola was not done with a one-year research grant. It was planned and it was something that took many years and quite a bit of an investment. Look at what we have now. It is a major part of Canada's agricultural sector. It was developed not with a focus on immediate results, but a long-term vision and careful research to develop a product that could have commercial value.

[Jobs, Growth and Long-term Prosperity Act, May 8th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, the short title of the bill includes long-term prosperity, and so we must discuss in my speech funding for basic research, because that is very important for our future prosperity. There has been a trend toward less and less funding for basic research under the government.

Allow me to take a little bit of time to talk about basic research, what it is and why it is important, because I do not know if it has ever been explained in detail in this House by somebody who has spent many years working on it.

What is basic research? It starts with curiosity. Scientists are human beings. They are passionate people. Why is it that scientists spend so much time and work so hard, like crazy, to try to figure out things and discover things? It is because they have passion. We cannot have scientists who are simply told, “Check one, two and three and see which one works the best”. Scientists work best when they do practical work in the world but they are allowed to step back and ask why things are the way they are and they are given the resources and are encouraged to try to answer that question.

Second, basic research is about finding a complete understanding, making logical sense of the world around us. There is a famous paper entitled “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural World” by physicist Eugene Wigner. In mathematics, in any logical system, any falsehood causes the entire logical edifice to fall apart. If we translate that into the natural world, any little inconsistency or oddity is worth sorting out, because it can lead to dramatic new understanding.

There are some really good examples of that. In the discovery of insulin, people noticed that when the pancreas of a dog was taken out, flies would be attracted to the sugar in the urine of dogs. In the discovery of stem cells, people noticed that there were little clumps of cells of different types on the spleens of irradiated mice. The study of the difference between theoretical models and actual measurements of the neutrino flux from the sun led to a complete changing of our understanding, our model for the physical universe and of the cosmos.

I mention these three examples because they are related to basic research that was done in Canada.

If we look very closely at nature, we find that there is always a lot more going on than we think. Science will surprise us, but after we have worked in research, we get used to that. It is why it is always possible to keep discovering new and important things.

That leads to the last thing about basic research, which is that it gives us hope for fundamental changes that will lead to a better life. It is not just technology or medicine; it is about learning better ways to take care of one another, better ways to communicate and co-operate, cleaner and more enduring ways to be prosperous and also for society to realize the real tangible value of intellectually honest pursuits of the truth. There is that value of basic research that I think is important.

The knowledge that comes out of basic research is like a piece of LEGO, a hard piece of plastic, hard, reliable, but it also has a history of dramatically changing the world. Knowledge is not really in books, journals and PowerPoint slides. It is in the minds of people. Basic research is where we train a lot of our graduate students who have the skills and acquire the knowledge, the experience in the ways of looking at the world and the discipline and rigour of working in scientific research, which they can then carry on and use elsewhere in their careers to benefit all of society.

Basic research produces models. It allows us to explain patterns we observe, and we need models. For example, if we want to sequester carbon dioxide underground, a rather important subject, we have to ask ourselves: Do we understand basic geology enough to be able to model the behaviour of that carbon dioxide underground for thousands of years?

The last thing I would say is that basic research produces unexpected discoveries. The results of basic research are uncertain. By definition they are uncertain, and basic, unexpected discoveries can be game changers. An example of that is basic research that was done in my riding on the ability of dissolved carbon dioxide to dissolve things, which may lead to the elimination of the need for tailings ponds in oil sands projects. Basic research can lead to a lot of unexpected things.

Why is government funding for basic research important? There are three reasons I would like to talk about today. One is that basic research leads to a public good. The market does not put a proper value on research that benefits more than just the people who do the research. There is a public good and that is why the government should get involved.

Second, the market fails when the funder of research has a commercial interest in the outcome. So in that case, sometimes private research creates ethical conflicts, and that is another time when government should step in.

Third, because basic research is intrinsically uncertain, it is intrinsically risky and small companies may not be able to take that risk, and that is another reason why a larger partner like the government should step in.

How do we know that funding for basic research in Canada has declined? We could look at the statistics, showing a decrease in funding for NSERC from $420 million in 2006 to $360 million in this year for basic research. Funding at SSHRC has declined after inflation. If we look at the success of grant applications to CIHR for basic research, it has hit 17% recently and has been going down for about a decade. Many research proposals, rated excellent by their peers, are being rejected and this is not limited to CIHR. We hear statements like, “I am appalled by the lack of the support for fundamental research in this country”. This is coming from top researchers in the country.

There is more money being spent on research, but that is money where an industrial-academic partnership is required and it is not basic research. It is a good thing to fund that, but not at the expense of basic research.

Let me give an example of one cut occurring in basic research that is pretty harmful. It is the cut to NSERC's research, technology and instrumentation grants program. This is funding that allows researchers to buy medium-sized equipment. As an analogy, instead of cutting from ten carpenters to nine carpenters, it is like keeping the ten carpenters but not letting them buy any tools. That is the problem with the RTI program. That is why researchers are furious about this grants program being cut. One researcher says:

Without the possibility to maintain and expand these fairly inexpensive research tools, my research will grind to a halt, in turn losing my ability to support the training of highly qualified personnel....

Another researcher says:

The changes to NSERC under the...government have been incredibly destructive, and the RTI cut will be an unmitigated disaster.... If this plan goes forward, then when these essential tools inevitably reach the end of their life, so will my research.

So what could we do besides spend more money? People have been saying we do spend a good amount of money on basic research, but we do not seem to be reaping the economic benefits. What needs to be done already exists out there, and one example of that is something called the GreenCentre in my riding. That is a centre in which there are dedicated scientists who are familiar with the basic research that is done at universities, the discovery centres out there. They look at the discoveries and they are trained to detect or decide on discoveries that may have a commercial application. They talk to their industrial partners and get some advice on which discoveries could be commercialized, and they work to commercialize those discoveries.

So it is not just people in industry saying they have a problem and they want to get the government to pay for a university researcher to figure it out for them. It is unlocking the value that is already there in the research that is at our universities.

In conclusion, we know that businesses do not spend enough on research and development in Canada, and money spent on research does not appear to be affecting rates of innovation and commercialization of research as much as it should. That is because we need a better strategy. We need to not ignore the value of basic research or to cut basic research, but we need to invest our efforts in pushing out the value of the discoveries we already have made in basic research, our world-leading capacity in basic research, and we need to push that out into the marketplace instead of letting everything be driven by industry asking researchers to change what they are doing and simply solve problems of industry.

[May 7th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, at the last minute I have decided to change what I was going to ask. Let me ask the parliamentary secretary a very simple yes or no question.

Will the government allow me, as somebody with a doctorate in physics who can talk science, to speak to any government scientist about science?

[May 7th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I am very impressed that the Parliamentary Secretary is staying to answer all three questions.

Canadian government scientists are not free to talk about their research. I am not asking for government scientists to have the ability to talk about government policy. I realize this is something that ministers should be doing. However, we are talking about allowing Canadian government scientists to talk about their research. The most famous example was a fishery scientist who published a paper about salmon in the prestigious journal Science, which attracted a lot of international attention. Journalists wanted to talk to her to find out more and they were prohibited from doing so.

The government has in the past said that scientists go to conferences, give talks and they can ask questions during the talks. However, those conferences are not accessible to the average Canadian taxpayer. The way that science is accessible to the average Canadian taxpayer is that the journalists get that information and they translate and process that information for the general public. To transfer that information, to really understand something, there has to be a back and forth of questions and answers and more questions and more answers. That is why professors in school tell their students to ask questions, that there is no dumb question. That is why we have debates in the House of Commons and we do not simply lecture each other or read from notes and spout our party's talking points. That is why we have real debates, at least we aspire to have real debates in the House.

There are also resources that are wasted in enforcing the government's communications policy, which is behind this restriction of Canadian government scientists. A great example of that appeared recently when a journalist from the Ottawa Citizen tried to find out about a joint study between the NRC in Canada and NASA in the United States. The journalist found out, through an access to information request, that the reason why he did not get information from the Canadian government was that something like 11 staffers spent a whole day exchanging 50 pages of emails to try to figure out what to say to the journalist. In the end, they did not say very much. However, when the journalist phoned NASA, in 15 minutes he found out this was a study about how radar had trouble determining the amount of snowfall.

There is a certain efficiency in just speaking the plain truth. Here we are talking about a lot of taxpayer money being wasted, and I know the parliamentary secretary cares about not wasting taxpayer money.

In the United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration allows scientists to talk freely about their research. That was an administrative order that came out the United States administration, because open government is important to it and scientific integrity and public trust is important. That is why it has a policy that allows its scientists to speak freely about their own research, not policy.

Science journalists are fed up because they cannot get the information they need on a timely basis to do their job. It has also been argued by the government that it is not a big problem, that it is just a small number of pesky journalists complaining. I would remind the House that 40 years ago today there was an investigation of a burglary in the Watergate Hotel and a small number of pesky journalists defended democracy. That is why it is so important to give journalists the information they need to stand on guard for Canadian democracy.

[Jobs, Growth and Long-term Prosperity Act, May 7th, 2012]

Madam Speaker, my hon. colleague asked the rhetorical question whether we should internalize costs for all natural resource industries as if it were some scary socialist thing.

Let me read a quote from someone I will identify momentarily, “The legitimate role for government is in so far as it can to, to control and check negative externalities.” Who said that? Milton Friedman, the go-to guy for principled Conservatives in favour of less government and more private enterprise. Milton Friedman said that it is a legitimate role of government, something he always wanted to minimize, to control and check negative externalities.

What does my hon. colleague think about Milton Friedman and does he respect Milton Friedman's opinion?

[Jobs, Growth and Long-term Prosperity Act, May 7th, 2012]

Madam Speaker, the Conservatives talk about tax cuts and the future in the same breath. However, cutting Environment Canada's budget, eviscerating environmental legislation, suppressing dissenting opinions and muzzling government scientists increases the risk of major environmental harm, which would be a high price for future generations to pay, would it not?