Mr. Speaker, on October 23 I asked the Minister of Industry about the government's decision to give $15 million for neutron research to a foreign country. It is absolutely incredible to believe that the minister knew nothing about this decision in his response to my question, when on October 17 with much fanfare, he directed the member for Hamilton West to make the funding announcement on his behalf. In the press release the government issued on this announcement, the Minister of Industry's name was all over it, so for the minister to feign ignorance during question period about his government's decision to give Canadian money away is not credible.
Despite the government's decision not to provide funding for the cabinet decision supporting a Canadian neutron facility, Canada's neutron scattering scientific community continues to provide leadership and innovation in this key technology for materials research, building on the pioneering efforts of our Nobel laureate, Dr. Bertram Brockhouse.
Without a national neutron beam laboratory, the community of Canadian researchers will leave, as has been the experience in small European nations that eliminated their neutron laboratories on the grounds that they had access to big international centres, such as the Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, France and the ISIS spallation source in the U.K.
In fact, shortly after I asked my question to the minister, I received this letter, which I will now read into the record:
Dear Member of Parliament,
I was pleased to see you were still tackling the government over a neutron source for Canada.
I moved to Deep River in 1999 hoping for a bright future in Canadian neutron research.
In my four years at the laboratory, no one can argue with my performance, publishing more papers in the scientific literature than most and the group went from strength to strength.
This growth brought in both Canadian and foreign researchers.
Sadly, I decided there was no future for a scientist in Canada and left the neutron group almost a year ago.
I now have a position in two U.S. national laboratories, working for the physics department at Brookhaven on Long Island, New York and the National Institute for Standards and Technology in Maryland.
The group was publishing a respectable 50-odd papers a year, but with this unclear future, several young, active scientists have left, me included.
Canada has a great history in neutron research with the 1994 Nobel prize winner in physics, the recently deceased Professor Brockhouse, doing all of his research in Chalk River.
Many foreigners trained in Canada have scattered around the world and as many Canadians have left for places like the U.S.A., including Thom Mason, the head of the $1.4 billion facility in Tennessee, where they can plan for a career in this field of science.
I hope your fight can prove me wrong and Canada gets a new source soon.
I look forward to the day when I read all about the government funding for a world class facility. I might even come back.
That letter, more than anything I could read into the record, demonstrates the misguided policies of the government when it comes to research and development and the brain drain that we all know exists. This is the proof that the brain drain is real and will continue to happen unless changes are made.
The facility run by Thom Mason that is referred to in that letter is the one to which the government just gave $15 million.