Madam Speaker, it is a privilege to stand in the House to speak on Bill C-13, an act to establish Canadian Institutes of Health Research and an act to repeal the Medical Research Council Act.
It was very interesting to hear my colleague from Elk Island talk about his friends who were afflicted with various diseases, in particular diabetes and how widespread that can be. Not only does it affect the way one's body metabolizes sugar but, as my colleague pointed out, it also affects one's eyesight, circulation and even the heart.
Many of the people I have known who have had severe diabetes have had their feet or another limb amputated just simply because their circulation was so bad. Because they were not able to maintain the circulation to keep those limbs alive, the limbs had to be amputated to save the person's life. That is a very traumatic thing.
We need to think back to the discoverers of insulin, the people who isolated and reproduced insulin and got it to the place where we could replace the insulin which was not produced in our bodies in order to break down the sugar.
Research in Canada has always been in the forefront. There are very significant contributions that have been made by Canadians, contributions that we should be extremely proud of.
In the medical area, I have already mentioned Doctors Banting and Best for their isolation and production of insulin. There are other areas that we should also be very proud of, and that is the production of the Avro Arrow for instance when we were able to develop a supersonic aircraft that was significantly ahead of its time and the sort of thing that would have been the envy of all the world. Even today, technology is just catching up to where the Avro Arrow was.
Whenever I think about research, whether it is medical, technological or in other areas, I think about the problem that we have in the country of maintaining our most inquisitive and best trained minds. There has been a great deal written and said with regard to the brain drain. It was not very long ago that the Prime Minister said that there was no problem, that there was no brain drain. Perhaps he might think that but there are all kinds of evidence to the contrary. We do have a problem with young people taking their skills south of the border in particular.
Some of the reasons they would do that is because there is more opportunity for them there. There is a less oppressive tax regime. They can keep more of the money they earn. They are also working for one hundred cent dollars. I know that is a rather novel approach but a dollar in the United States is still worth one hundred cents.
As a result of the tax regime in this country, we find that our tax freedom day comes around July 1. I do not know if it is particularly significant that we celebrate Canada Day on July 1. Maybe we could get a little funding for that so we could celebrate tax freedom and Canada Day all in one. Maybe we could save some costs on the celebration. Ideally, I would like to see the tax freedom day moved backwards to June or May or, heaven forbid, maybe even April.
One of the main reasons we have such tremendous difficulty keeping active, young, inquisitive minds here is that they are having a very difficult time making a go of it. I will give an example of what I am talking about.
Adam is the father of three boys. His wife chooses to stay home and look after the children because they think they can do a better job of raising their children than the state. Adam earns almost $53,000 a year, which amounts to about $4,412 a month. That is not a bad salary, but we must consider that five people have to live on that after $1,130 is taken out for income tax, $110 per month for unemployment insurance and $140 per month for the Canada pension plan. After that he has to pay his mortgage, his insurance and all of those other things.
The reason I particularly mentioned the Canada pension plan is because Adam has said that he has given up on the idea of ever having the Canada pension plan. Part of the reason, he says, is that so many of our—