Mr. Speaker, I listened to the member opposite with great interest but also with great sadness. He belongs to a party which aspires to govern. It thinks that the only tool available to a government is the tax structure and that the only way to help Canadians is by cutting taxes.
I live in the province of Ontario, Mr. Speaker, as do you. We know that we have a government which cut taxes and simply left the province in a deficit. The people of Ontario are paying a larger and larger debt.
The member mentioned brain drain and sustainable jobs for Canadians. His party wants to cut taxes so that the brain drain will stop and these jobs will magically appear. I must say this is not what Canada is about and it certainly is not what the role of the federal government is in this wonderful Confederation in which we live.
I would like to talk about sustainable jobs. I would like to talk about the spending side of budgets, not only in this budget but also budgets passed. I want to say that we too have cut taxes but we have also increased spending in appropriate areas, those which reduce the brain drain and create the sustainable jobs that the member opposite was talking about.
I was shocked the week before last to hear one of his colleagues attacking our support of the SSHRC which is the main funding council for social science and humanities research in Canada. His colleague read out a list of the grants in support of research into Canadianness which he objected to. That is the sort of thing we need to teach people in Canada, the idea and real understanding of what the country is about.
I want to go back a few budgets to the time when we came into government. We inherited a fiscal situation in which the government of the day, the government which preceded us, was borrowing almost a billion dollars a week to pay its way and was simply adding almost a billion dollars a week to the debt which we are all still paying off. That adds up to about the budget of the province of Ontario being borrowed by the federal government every year and added to the debt for future Canadians.
We came in and we sorted that out; we downsized government. However, in those very years when we were downsizing we started spending money in areas which in the long term, and I understand that it is not easy for governments to think long term, would make for a stronger economy and for a stronger Canada.
For example, we started increasing funding for research to the council I just mentioned, or to NSERC which is the engineering and sciences research council, or to what was then the health research council. We steadily increased funding to those councils. That money went to researchers, to graduate students and to universities and colleges to help the quality of work which was being done there.
Another example is the health research council which is now called the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Last year we doubled the funding for health research in Canada.
This has two effects. First, it improves future health and future health care. It also helps us retain the best and the brightest of health research workers. That is not a casual decision. Its budget went up again significantly in this current budget. That has been a steady and gradual increase in an area which has strengthened Canada. It has strengthened sustainable jobs and reduced the brain drain which the member was talking about.
Over that period we brought in the Canada Foundation for Innovation. One of the problems that our institutions were facing, largely because of decreased provincial funding, was that they lacked the infrastructure for research labs. Our hospitals lacked the infrastructure for research labs. The Canada Foundation for Innovation was brought in to fund that sort of thing and for a number of years now, including this year, it has been flowing money for the infrastructure of research in our hospitals, universities and, I must stress, in our colleges.
We know that applied research is going on in community colleges all across Canada. It is involved at the very grassroots of some areas of technology. A portion of the funding of the Canada foundation for innovation was put aside deliberately for our colleges in every part of the country. A particular part of it was also put aside for smaller institutions, the smaller universities of Canada.
When a small institution finds itself with brilliant young researchers it is often difficult for it to give them the infrastructure backing that they need. One of the roles of a national government is to look in the regions to see where the talent is and to reach out and help tap that talent. Perhaps it is a small province that cannot support it. Perhaps it is in a part of a large province that does not get its share of research funding. That is the Canada foundation for innovation.
I am now talking about a broad sweeping policy addressing the matters that the member opposite was talking about. The government invested in 2,000 fully funded Canada research chairs for universities all across the country. It included support for infrastructure for those chairs so that if a small university got one of the chairs it would be able to either bring back to Canada a researcher who had left or keep a young researcher here who otherwise would have left. It not only got the salary for that researcher but it got some infrastructure support so that it could hold the person who got the research chair. There are 2,000 of those flowing across the country.
In the budget we are discussing today there was another remarkable step. I have already mentioned the infrastructure of research but there was another aspect which was the general indirect costs of research.
For example, a university or a college in northern Ontario may receive a grant of $100,000 to do some wonderful research that has to do with the lumber industry or mining or whatever. The money would not all go into equipment. There would be costs for research assistants, perhaps some students for the summer to work on the project. The small university or college would not have the money and could not afford the indirect costs. They could perhaps pay the research assistant but would not have a room or a computer. Those are called indirect costs.
For the first time, and the federal government is the first to do so, it has agreed to support indirect costs of research with a formula which means that smaller institutions would get relatively more indirect costs of research than larger ones. The reason is that a big university always has a few spare rooms to house assistants.
There is a progression of five or six years in the budget. It would culminate with keeping the best and brightest here, attracting the best and brightest back, and using the knowledge and research they do to enrich the country. The real wealth of the country is of course the people.
I was shocked at the Canadian Alliance member talking the way he did and thinking that all we had to do was cut taxes and magically the whole country would be better. Of course there should be no unnecessary taxation, but if that party aspires to govern it must learn that there is a tax structure and there are ways in which taxes are spent.
We need to make this country fully sustainable through thoughtful and creative expenditures of the moneys which taxpayers will gladly pay if they know in fact that the country will be stronger in the future because of those expenditures.