I won't repeat the four recommendations. They are in the brief. I'll just move on to elaborate briefly on the first of those.
PGSE is impressed that the government has recently moved to streamline its external advisory system by replacing a number of bodies with the new Science, Technology and Innovation Council. This will consolidate science advice to government through a blue ribbon panel of external and internal scientists and managers who'll be able to tap a wide range of sources of scientific advice from outside government.
The Council of Canadian Academies, which was established in 2006 with a mandate to carry out science assessments, is another essential mechanism to improve science advice to government. We support both of those. We think the government should continue to support those bodies; ensure that they have viable secretariats and that they are strengthened.
On the matter of reinvestment in federal research infrastructure, we feel that the government needs to have a strong internal science capacity to provide a science base for policy development and to support a number of things government does--standard-setting, regulation formulation, and the provision of science-based government services. It's well and good to have advice from outside, but you also need an internal mechanism to evaluate that advice and to produce independent bits of it.
It's well known that the government's internal science capacity has diminished in recent years because of cuts over, I would say, the last decade. In some areas of national priority, such as climate change, energy supply, water supply--the whole area of environmental sustainability--and public health, our science departments are critically short of resources. The government should move to identify research gaps that cannot or will not be filled through university research and should make sure they're filled through in-house efforts.
In doing so, the government will maintain the capacity to judge external research where it exists. You can't be a good judge of what's going on outside if you're not a reasonable expert on the subject matter yourself. We think that such input is vital to properly inform decisions and policies. The 2008 budget did a number of good things for science and technology, but it was silent on the question of strengthening the government's in-house science capacity.
The third recommendation is related to that, and it has to do with the federal infrastructure for gathering and managing data. Much data is critical for monitoring the state of affairs in the priority areas I mentioned, and it's suffering from rust-out and obsolescence. Not only the infrastructure, but the people who do that kind of thing are, by and large, missing. So it's essential, we think, that Canada have ongoing records of environmental conditions, for example, so you can monitor the speed and extent of change and stimulate the development of new technologies. The retention of such records also provides a lasting legacy for comparative purposes and for ongoing analysis.
These are things that cannot easily be done by universities, and they can't be done by the private sector, although the private sector can be engaged as contractors. Government has a fundamental responsibility to monitor these fundamental matters of the Canadian physical environment.
There are growing weaknesses in the monitoring of climate and water resources, in particular, that require urgent attention. You may have heard about these from other witnesses at other meetings. There is an assessment of water issues by the Council of Canadian Academies currently under way, and we think that should get close attention.
Finally, support for big science in Canada lacks a coordinated approach. There was, at one time, a mandate in the Office of the National Science Advisor to develop a strategy for Canadian government support of big science. That office has now been closed, and that work was never done. We think the matter needs to be taken up again, either by STIC or by the Council of Canadian Academies, but it needs to be done somewhere.
And that's the end.