Thank you.
Welcome to all the guests.
I want to begin by reaffirming what some of you have already said, which is that this massive budget implementation act is like nothing we have ever seen. My colleague has said that there may have been two other BIAs that this government has brought in that had more pages, but neither of them had this complexity and this number of laws impacted, and neither had the vast scope that we are seeing now, which of course is all under time allocation, so they do not get to be thoroughly debated. Each of the areas you are raising is so substantive on its own.
I'll try to be quick because I have five minutes to ask all of you questions.
First of all, Mr. Turk, something that we've not had the chance to talk about here until you raised it was the issue of cuts to Archives, although I have been contacted by many archivists and many of my constituents about this. The heritage minister assures us that “All the services that we operate right now to Canadians will continue, but they'll be done differently.” That's a quote.
First of all, I'd like to get your comment on that.
Secondly, most thinking people agree that we are increasingly living in a knowledge economy. Scientific expertise and capacity is important. I would like your brief comment about so many of our scientists' getting pink slips and so many of our scientific institutions being, if not undermined, then certainly eliminated, and the potential economic impact of those decisions.