Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, minister, for coming here today.
You and I had the opportunity to take part in the Genome Canada funding announcement recently in Toronto. I had the opportunity to meet Dr. Stephen Scherer, a world-leading researcher based right here in Canada working on the autism genome project.
Time and again we hear wonderful things about great research being done across this country. Despite that, we hear you in the House of Commons having to answer questions from the opposition as well as questions from the media with respect to this apparent muzzling of scientists. I suspect that as we go through the course of this meeting today the opposition will continue to weave that fiction.
You consistently responded that there hasn't been a government in Canadian history that has invested in science and technology to the extent that our government has, and how proud we are to promote the important work our scientists are doing. You provided wonderful evidence, I think, demonstrating the extent to which we share research material and publish research findings. Their scientists provide thousands of interviews per year regarding their work and lecture at conferences all over the world.
Despite all this, and again as we'll probably hear a little later today, the opposition continues to weave their fiction and play political games with this. Could you share with us some facts and figures that might help clearly dispute any notion that our scientists are muzzled?