Mr. Chair, just to the witnesses, thank you again for being here. There are specific challenges in the Arctic with climate change that we're not studying or researching, and they are living the effects of our planet's changing climate first-hand.
I cannot say what the study that they were here to provide information on will say, but I suspect that in the end it will be that the federal government should fund research into indigenous and northern traditional sciences and how we could incorporate them into fighting climate change.
This is where the funding aspect will come in. How do we fund that? We have $1.5 billion of taxpayers' money that is just frozen now. It was collected; the purpose of that taxation was to help lower emissions in Canada, and now we find out that it was really to get insiders rich. It's disgusting to think about the hypocrites out there who cry out about the crisis that we face and then steal money from a fund that was supposed to address that crisis.
I would hope that we all think about this and the importance of getting to the bottom of these issues and how they relate to the science and all the opportunity costs. If there's this massive amount of fraud in the sponsorship 2.0 fund, think of all the science that's not going to be invested in, think of the research that's not going to be done, and think of the discoveries that will not happen because of the theft of taxpayers' dollars out of this fund. I think we do ourselves a disservice by not entertaining this motion for five meetings to get to the bottom of what happened and who got rich.
Thank you.