Madam Speaker, I am pleased to participate in the debate on Bill C-13, an act to establish the Canadian institutes of health research, to repeal the Medical Research Council Act and to make consequential amendments to other acts.
Never let it be said that members of the official opposition oppose all government legislation for the sake of opposing. While we have an onus to oppose as the opposition in this adversarial parliamentary system, we frequently support bills which we think are in the public interest. We are pleased to lend our support to this thoughtful bill which seeks to improve the administration of grants and funding for medical and scientific research.
As we have heard in this debate, currently grants to finance medical research are administered by the Medical Research Council, an agency of the government established many years ago on the common bureaucratic model of such agencies, with a minimum of accountability and transparency and, many would argue, an excess of administrative costs and wasteful bureaucracy, money which ought to be directed toward real frontline, concrete, scientific research.
Following consultations with members of the medical research community and those involved in this field the government decided, I think correctly, to reform and streamline this process by creating the Canadian institutes of health research to decentralize the administration of these grants and the funding of this research and to make somewhat more accountable and perhaps less bureaucratic the structure of these new agencies.
The new institutes of health research will have one central co-ordinating body or governing council which will consist of a president and an advisory board of no more than 20 members. This governing council will be empowered under the bill to appoint a scientific director and advisory board for each institute, which will deal with particular areas of research, each incorporating expertise in their respective fields.
While we are pleased to see that the decentralized specific advisory boards will be appointed by the governing council and not by the cabinet or the government, we are concerned that the governing council of the CIHR will be appointed by the federal cabinet.
This is a point that we raise in virtually every bill that comes before us. We are as deeply concerned as most Canadians about the enormous, largely unchecked power of the Prime Minister through governor in council appointments to name political friends of the government to sensitive positions throughout the entire public service, agencies, crown corporations and the like.
Many objective observers have suggested that in Canada our executive branch, our Prime Minister and cabinet, exercises more power and more unchecked discretion with respect to appointments than any other parliamentary or republican government in the democratic world.
A case in point would be the recent selection by the Prime Minister through a governor in council appointment of the president of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. We could look to our mother parliament in the United Kingdom where such decisions as the appointment of the president of the British Broadcasting Corporation are delegated to the board of that crown corporation rather than retained and exercised by Her Majesty in council. I would strongly suggest that the government review how it could decentralize this appointment process for the governing council of the health research institutes.
I commend the government for its commitment, in the presentation of this bill, to spend no more than 4% to 5% of the operating budget of the CIHR on administration. However we would like to see some firm guarantees that this will be the case. It is a tragedy when scarce tax dollars are directed toward important agencies of this nature and are eaten up by bureaucracy and administration. Too often we see that happen. One would say that it is almost inevitable. It is almost the result of human nature that bureaucracies will tend to grow if given the opportunity.
I propose that there ought to be a legislated maximum of administration costs. Those administration costs ought to be defined and should be verified by the auditor general who is answerable to this place. That would be an important guarantee, a step toward reforming agencies of this nature in the public sector in general to ensure that the tax dollars we allocate actually go to frontline research.
This is critically important research. I am glad to see that the importance of medical research is recognized by all parties and, I would suggest, by all people across the ideological and partisan spectra.
Sometimes members of the Reform Party are accused of opposing government per se and in toto. It is alleged that we support the libertarian night watchman state and see no role for government agencies or programs. I would say, to the contrary, that in our last election platform and in our fiscal proposals of the past several years we have consistently supported increased funding for medical research and frontline real, hard scientific research, because we think that government is in a unique position to use public resources to finance the sort of research that would not otherwise be properly financed through the private sector.
Let me be on the record as a frugal fiscal conservative in saying that even I strongly support the proposed budgetary increases from the Medical Research Council to the Canadian institutes for health research contemplated in the bill.
We understand that the government has proposed for the fiscal year 2000-01 to allocate a budget of some $374 million to be increased in the following fiscal year to some $500 million. Again we hope that every cent possible will be directed to real research of a practical nature rather than to administration and overhead.
I understand the selection committee estimates that approximately 200 more research grants will be awarded under the new institutes than will be awarded under the current Medical Research Council, which is a positive step forward.
We hope this new structure will incorporate the advice and active involvement of all so-called stakeholders in the medical research field, including academic researchers, researchers in the private sector, in pharmaceutical companies and in other health care companies, and researchers in government agencies and departments. Working together these various branches of society will be able to identify the most important targets for medical research.
We know that we have made enormous advances in the century now coming to a close, in finding cures and treatments for ailments and diseases which have plagued mankind throughout history. We see this reflected in the enormous improvement in vital statistics and life expectancy, lower infant mortality and the general quality of life that we all enjoy.
The kinds of medical treatment that have been discovered by modern medical research, which we often take for granted, were unthinkable for our ancestors who founded this country. We owe it to them and to the future to continue directing a substantial portion of our collective social resources to stamping out the scourges and diseases that remain unresolved, such as cancer and many other diseases that claim so many lives.
In closing, I am pleased to announce my support for this bill and commend the government for its introduction.