Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to my colleague's remarks. I was intrigued by them.
First we have to remember that the Canada foundation for innovation was not set up this year. We are discussing additional funding for it. It was set up three or more years ago. It was conceived at a time when the economy was nothing like as robust as it is now, when there was an even more serious problem about research and development in Canada. There was a serious brain drain. We were losing some of our best researchers. At the same time, Canadians who had gone overseas to be trained were simply not coming home and certainly foreign researchers were not considering coming to Canada to conduct their research.
A survey showed that it had nothing to do with salaries, which people often quote. It had to do with the fact the people here who were engaged in research projects either had old-fashioned laboratories or old-fashioned equipment or, in their relatively short productive research years, they simply did not have the research support they needed. It was the same thing with people overseas. People newly graduated from a foreign university could not come here and conduct their experiments because the infrastructure was simply not here.
So with regard to the hon. member's remarks, the purpose was to provide research infrastructure very quickly to attract these people back here and, by the way, to keep our best people here. Since then that has happened, but there is one other thing he mentioned. We have also changed the R and D tax environment because it was one of the factors the private sector kept telling us about. We now have one of the best, if not the best, research and development tax structures. The effects will be seen this year and in coming years.
We started the CFI and a whole raft of other investments, and we now have the best tax structure. I wonder if the member could comment on those things in light of my remarks.