Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill C-13. It is a rare occasion when a member of the official opposition can stand in the House and actually congratulate the government on putting forward a bill that does contain at least a few very good points.
We are inclined to support this legislation because it has some very unusual and strange things, unusual and strange to the Liberal Party of Canada. One thing is accountability. It builds accountability into the new CIHR. It is really strange that it does allow for the governing council and the advisory board to be chosen by the research people themselves as opposed to simply being appointed by some Liberal patronage officer, which has been the case in the past with the Medical Research Council.
The Canadian institutes of health research will replace the current Medical Research Council. This is good for a number of reasons. One is accountability. Another is that the governing council and the advisers will be chosen by the researchers themselves.
Also, for anyone who does receive a research grant under this new set-up there will be an accountability requirement that goes along with the funding. That means that within six months and every six months subsequently, as I understand it, the researcher that has the funding will have to account for the work he or she has been doing and show why he or she should continue to receive funding. This is a good thing. It has not been present unfortunately under the current Medical Research Council and that has been a process that we have not been able to support.
Another good thing about the Canadian institutes of health research is that the administrative costs will only be in the range of 4% to 5%. This is another aspect of this unusual piece of government legislation that we can certainly support.
Most of the boards, commissions and governing councils that have been set up under a varying amount of Liberal appointments and structures have subjected the Canadian taxpayer to more and more administrative costs. At the bottom line it has been shown very often that these numerous boards the government has set up have simply been places for friends of the Liberal Party to spend the rest of their days in relatively nice comfort.
We are going into question period now and I will be very pleased after question period to talk about some of the features of the bill and why we will support it. I will also continue to remind Canadians that it is very seldom that the government puts forward a bill that the Reform Party, the official opposition, can actually support. This just happens to be one of them.