Thank you very much, Madam Chairperson.
I thank the witnesses very much for having come before us today.
As I was listening to the minister earlier, something seemed paradoxical in her introductory remarks. She stated that: “Research is essential to finding new ways of protecting and improving Canadians' health.”
Unfortunately—we saw this in the last budget—the Conservative government cut close to $160 million from research budgets. In the health field, we can see that in 2006, the Canadian Institues of Health Research indicated that they had an urgent need for 150 million additional dollars for the necessary funding of investment in employment and infrastructure. The problem is that the CIHR, the NSERC and the SSHRC will see their budgets cut by $148 million over the next three years.
So on the one hand, we hear that there is a crying need for investments for researchers, that this is a priority for the minister, that you absolutely want to invest in research to attempt to find new vaccines. We can see, particularly these days with the H1N1 virus, that there is an important need to fund research to attempt to find new cures, new antidotes. However, by the same token, we see budget cuts to everything that could help scientists obtain the tools they need to try to find these cures.
I would have liked to put the question directly to the minister, but perhaps you could enlighten me concerning the funding?