At Laval University. If memory serves, he also hated administrative law, yet it does not prevent him from having an interest for politics.
Furthermore, provincial governments fund 1% and the private sector, through mandates and partnerships with the public sector, funds 27%. The most interesting information I want to point out is the fact that hospitals and universities fund 45% of research.
Close to 50% of health research is performed in hospitals and universities. It is therefore important to have a bill which will take this fact into account.
If I asked who is responsible for health institutions and hospitals, who has jurisdiction constitutionally, I believe that we would all be tempted to answer that it is, of course, the provinces.
We are facing a situation we have questions about. The federal government wants to invest in research and development. I remind the House that the Bloc Quebecois, an eminently responsible political formation, has always asked an investment be made in research.
I wish you had been there in 1993 during the electoral campaign led by an extraordinary campaigner, Lucien Bouchard. The current Premier of Quebec and his team of candidates asked the federal government to put an end to our historical lag in the area of research and development, with data to support that request. We repeated the request in 1997.
But it took two electoral campaigns, masterfully led by the Bloc Quebecois in Quebec, for the federal government to finally understand this request and to invest in research. The government is to be thanked for investing in research, but there is a problem.
I am convinced that my colleague, the member for Chambly, will agree. Let me digress for a moment just to say that, according to the referendum results, the riding where participation was the highest in 1995 is Chambly. I know that down deep the member for Chambly must be very proud of that fact.
Getting back to the subject at hand, I was saying that we hope there will be some major investments in health research. However, could we not be led to believe—I ask the question to my colleagues who all seem extremely interested in that bill—that what we have here is a nation building bill? By presenting this bill on Canadian institutes of health research, is the federal government not looking for greater visibility?
If its main objective were to consolidate biomedical research and to promoters greater interaction between researchers who work in that field, it could have allocated money to the provinces. Members should not forget that Quebec has its Fonds de la recherche en santé du Québec, chaired by Dr. Bureau. Quebec has had a policy for several years already and has been investing in research and has defined major directions.
There is a paradox in the bill. There is an insistence on nation building and, yet, there is a divorce between where the research will be conducted and the responsibility the Canadian government wants to have confirmed by this bill.
This is not to say that historically research is exclusively a provincial jurisdiction. No. We know better on this side of the House than to suggest that. What we say, however, is that it might have been more interesting, for efficiency's sake and out of respect for the provinces, to allocate money to existing initiatives, especially considering that half of the medical research is done in universities and hospitals, which are themselves agents of the provinces.
The Government of Quebec is not comfortable with such a bill. Things would have been a lot simpler if the government had accepted the amendments moved by the opposition.
We said “Yes, let us establish institutes of health research.” I will, if I may, digress, because if people take a cursory glance at the bill, they may get the impression—and the minister said this many times publicly—that 15 institutes will be established.
The government says that there will a budget of $240 million to begin with, that $500 million will be provided at the most crucial phase, in 2001-2002, that the Canadian institutes of health research will have a thematic focus.
Each institute will have four major research focuses: bio-medical research, clinical research, research to improve people's health of populations and research on our health care system. Yet, because I have been extremely vigilant in examining this bill, I noticed that there will be only one institute and that the governing council is very centralized.
This centralized institute will oversee 15 other institutes that are not really independent. They will not have genuine operational independence, at least not according to what is provided in this bill. This is a trap and is of concern to us.
Just to show that there is no genuine operational independence, the bill provides that all equipment acquired shall remain the property of the federal crown. All research projects submitted to the different advisory committees in each institute and approved by them will have to get the approval of the governing council. I think members will agree that we have seen better instances of operational independence.
There is another paradox. The chairperson of the governing council and the chief executive officer are the same person. I hope that the parliamentary secretary, my friend from Anjou—Rivière-des-Prairies, with whom I share a passion for Montreal, will remember that we asked him questions about that in committee. We asked him why the two functions were performed by the same person.
I will give an example for the enlightenment of my colleague, the parliamentary secretary. Let us take the Régie des installations olympiques—$500 million is a lot of money—whose board of directors recently had a new roof made for the stadium. This organization has a budget of less than $500 million. Yet, as is the case with most crown corporations and other public organizations, it was felt that the chairperson of the board and the chief executive officer ought to be two different persons.
Such a distinction is important and, according to philosopher Montesquieu, it is essential in order to have checks and balances. The chief executive officer must make decisions for the day to day administration of the health institutes so they can fulfil their terms of reference.
The role of the chairperson of the governing council is one of supervision and control, that of a watchdog. Are we to conclude that this role of monitoring, of control, this eminently desirable watchdog role when the public's money is concerned, can be properly exercized when we realize the chairman of the board and the CEO are one and the same person? Really now, that makes no sense.
The government has failed in its duty. I repeat, we are in favour of the principle of this bill. We acknowledge the government's desire to create links, forums for interaction, for exchange, for focusing researchers' efforts. We agree that this is the path modern research needs to take, but we believe this bill has a certain number of flaws, and have sought to improve it.
I must admit, however, that the government has unfortunately turned a deaf ear to our amendments. It has not, in fact, accepted a single one. We introduced about thirty of them, each one more relevant than the last, and these were amendments which witnesses had called for. Unfortunately, the government turned a deaf ear to them. That is its prerogative, but I am forced to say that the bill would have benefited considerably from them.
Before going into any further detail on the research institutes, I would like to point out that, on February 14, the Government of Quebec, the government of Lucien Bouchard, through Mrs. Marois, the Minister of State for Health, and Jean Rochon, whose name is always mentioned with pleasure in this House because of his past accomplishments, wrote to the Minister of Health, over the signatures of the two ministers but on behalf of the entire government, to express its opposition.
I will read the letter in question, if I may, for the sake of transparency. I will also say that we moved 33 amendments of every nature, and that it would have been desirable for the government to agree to them. I will now begin reading the letter:
This is pursuant to the introduction in the House of Commons, on November 4, 1999, of 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.
Your government had already announced, in its February 1999 budget, that this new structure would be responsible for distributing $240 million to fund research projects until the year 2001-2002.
Therefore, it is no surprise that Bill C-13 was welcomed by the scientific and research community which, needless to say, was severely affected by the federal cuts made in recent years.
I will continue reading this letter, but I want to take this opportunity to remind the House that the federal government cut $33 billion in cash transfers and in transfer payments to the provinces. Obviously, when the government makes cuts to transfer payments, it affects the provinces' ability to support the research efforts of the various granting agencies for which they have primary responsibility.
The next excerpt is very important. I do not know if my comments can be heard in dolby or in stereo, but I hope they will be clearly heard in the House, particularly by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance, who is here with us today.
While the Government of Quebec shares and understands the satisfaction expressed by the research community in Quebec in that regard and recognizes that it is necessary for our two governments to co-operate in the area of research, it is troubled—
The term used here is quite strong, and meant to be. Could someone give me the Latin root of the word troubled? Does the hon. member for Chambly remember?