Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thanks to the witnesses for coming today.
As members of Parliament, our job is to ensure that the taxpayer is getting value for their tax dollars. If our goal of research is research excellence, where we put our money should pursue excellence as well.
In our next panel, we're going to hear from an organization called Retraction Watch, which has done an excellent job of exposing falsified or poor research. Its work ensures that we can move toward research excellence.
In 2017, the Liberal government put together a fund called the Canada 150 research chairs. Mr. Hanley, your organization, understandably, welcomed that. One of the new research chairs was Jonathan Pruitt, the chair for biological dystopias. He received a one-time federal grant of $350,000 for seven years, which is a total of $2.4 million taxpayer dollars. What he did with that money was write a bunch of papers using falsified data. Thanks to Retraction Watch, we know he had 15 papers retracted over three years.
When we're pursuing research excellence, going forward, how do we prevent this type of fraud from happening and what gaps might exist that we need to address to prevent this from happening again?