Thank you, Madam Chair.
We heard here, just today, that small and medium-sized enterprises in Canada are not investing in R and D. Part of that, I think, is due to the carbon tax, which the Parliamentary Budget Officer notes as taking somewhere between $20 billion and $30 billion out of our economy. One of the first things that small and medium businesses end up cutting is R and D, so I would totally translate that the costs of the carbon tax are impacting the research that small and medium enterprises are doing.
We also see two million people lining up at the food bank every month. One thing that I often hear back home is that the government seems to be focused on nothing in particular and everything at once, and also pursuing.... Folks are very frustrated when they see Canadian dollars going abroad.
I have a list here of studies that have been funded, to the tunes of hundreds of thousands of dollars, in the United States. We just heard about, I think the technical term was “crazy amounts of money”—I like that term—that the Americans are spending on research. Why in the world would we be funding American universities? The University of Maine, Clarkson University, Michigan Technological University and the University of Vermont are all getting hundreds of thousands of dollars. Boston University...$90,000. The one that galls me the most—I cannot figure this out—is $600,000 for the study of conservation of a central habitat for polar bears. As far as I know, Canada has the market cornered on polar bears. Why are we sending money to the University of Washington to do the study on the essential habitat for polar bears?
I get the impression that you've been proponents of this capstone research program. All this money that I've mentioned comes through the ministry of the environment, which...I'm not quite sure whether that money is then funnelled through the tri-council or what, so how do we...? There are two things to this. One is that this money is being funnelled to the United States, and we're competing with “crazy” money down there. Two, why is this money not being run through the tri-council? Do you imagine that this capstone would capture...so that we're not seeing this “madly off in all directions” research funding?
Go ahead, Mr. Bouchard.