Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I would like to continue along the same lines as Mr. Stanton and Mr. Vincent.
The Government of Canada has an obligation to invest in scientific research, but it also has an obligation to justify its actions to its citizens. So you have the obligation to help the government explain to Canadians what they get in exchange for the considerable financial contribution they make to universities to which they likely have no intention of sending their children.
When we spend a lot of money to send athletes to the Olympic Games, maybe one gold medal comes back. It does not happen often. The Canadian culture of mediocrity means that very often athletes placing twentieth at the Olympic Games come back saying how well they did, and no taxpayer should believe that.
In the field of scientific research, if you look at things from the point of view of the ordinary taxpayer and not from the point of view of a self-satisfied university professor, can we come up with a criterion, a test, that an ordinary citizen can use to see how his hard-earned money has been used by the scientific community? What would you be prepared to do so that a labourer who pays his taxes with the sweat of his brow can be kept up to date on the results? In that way, that ordinary citizen would not be mad at his government because he handed over so much money, and yet—to continue the analogy of the Olympic Games—precious few Nobel Prizes have been won.