Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, folks, for coming here today to talk to us about what is an extremely important role that you have.
I want to hear a little about SSHRC's responsibilities, but that's more a play on words than anything. Most of us around this table have science and engineering backgrounds, and so on. When we look at some of the different things that are expected, and aspects of the studies that you have, and what is going on, I think that in a lot of ways we look at it from the perspective of true scientific discovery rather than political science, or maybe social science. As I've always said about scientists, they'll never say there's a zero result of something happening, and that's when the political sciences jump in it to tell you that means it's terrible. I guess that's part of it.
One of the terms that always gets thrown into the mix is the term “social licence“. I think it's important that everyone recognizes the metrics that are used, because that's where the political science side of it comes in. It must be extremely difficult for you to be able to look at different projects or their different components and the people who might want to be part of that, and separate what should be out of it and what should be in it. That's more or less a comment that I wanted to make.
The other part is that you say that your grants are small, but certainly to the people we have talked to they have been well received. You can be proud of that part.
I did go through your imagining Canada's future initiative that you launched in June 2011. One of the things I did want to emphasize is that one of the six future challenge areas asked, “What effect will the quest for energy and natural resources have on our society and our position on the world stage?” I think that's what I was getting at when I was talking about the concept of social licence and the types of things that are going on there.
I'm wondering how you're able to make sure that all of the discussions taking place are fair. I have a background in agriculture as well, and so I noticed that one of your projects was with someone who was studying at the Max Planck Institutes in Germany and trying to research agricultural land use. I know a lot of people from Europe, and their farming practices are very different from ours. Expectations, uses of genetically modified organisms, and all of those other sorts of things also tie into the same point I was making earlier.
I'm wondering if you could give us a bit of an overview of how you have maintained the credibility that one would anticipate from true scientists doing true scientific work.