Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to join in the debate on the budget. I listened with great interest to what colleagues on both sides have said today.
I would like to talk about the education, training and research parts of the budget. However before I do that I would like to make it clear that I do understand that the budget is a very remarkable whole, that the different parts of it fit together in a very unusual way.
Strengthening the economy is contained in the budget. My colleague just mentioned one aspect of it. For example, small business has been greatly strengthened by the reduction in the capital tax and by the changing definition of small business from $200,000 to $300,000. Small business people in my riding have complimented me on that. That is one example of the way the economy is strengthened through this budget.
The paying down of the debt has also been mentioned today. This is not something that I often talk about but I am pleased that we are approaching the paying down of almost 10% of this enormous national debt that we inherited from many decades of spending. I am glad the government is chipping away at that. I was particularly pleased to see in the budget that we have now patriated 82% of the debt. We only owe 18% of it overseas and we owe 82% of it to ourselves. If we are going to be in debt, it seems to me that the best way to be in debt is to be in debt to ourselves or to members of our family. That is a great improvement.
The economy is strengthened by those fiscal actions. It is that fiscal soundness that has allowed us, at last, as a federal government, to start doing some of the things that a national government should do, and that is to make investments in the important aspects of Canadian society.
Many people speak of this budget as a health care budget, not only because of the huge sums of money which are now being recommitted to health care after very difficult times, but also because of the vision that has accompanied that reinvestment, the vision that was generated by the Romanow report, which captured the views of the country and which this budget put into place.
For example, emphasis on supporting primary care is included in the budget, and that is extremely important. Also important is the emphasis on home care and the emphasis on the catastrophic cost of drugs where a family is simply overwhelmed by the cost of one drug that a family member has to have. I am not against investing money in the health care system but it is the way investments have been made. I think this is fine.
Improving the lot of aboriginal people is also in the budget. Despite the international situation, our economy is doing extraordinarily well and yet here is this identifiable group, the aboriginal peoples, who have been in Canada for 10,000 years and in some cases more, identifiable by their poverty, by the levels of certain types of illness that exist in their communities, by the low levels of education and the high dropout rate from high school and so on. I am pleased to see that we are investing in that area.
Improving the lot of children is also included in this budget. We have worked in recent years toward improving the lot of seniors and, goodness knows, we have a way to go in that area. Last year for the first time in Canada there was a tiny improvement in the index of child poverty. I believe that tiny improvement came from our establishment of the child tax benefit. In this budget we have increased the child tax benefit to $3,200 for the eldest child with less for further children, plus $1,800 in the case where a child is disabled. I hope that as that investment flows through we will see further improvements in the measures to combat child poverty across Canada. In a country as rich as this we should not have children in poverty.
The budget also moves toward improving child care. The federal government has put its money on the table and has asked the provinces to join it in developing quality child care across the country. I like that.
My colleague mentioned the EI and said that it was a tax of some sort. We tend to forget that the EI was used in previous budgets to develop our system of parental leave, where the parents of a newborn child, between them, can take extensive leave so that in those critical years of life the child can be properly looked after. I am glad the EI funds are being used for that.
This time, the further addition, a modest first step I would say, is the palliative leave under the EI program. Under the budget people who are taking care of relatives who are dying can take up to four weeks of leave under this program. They can take, for example, a week now, a week in a month's time or different weeks at intervals but they can also take the whole month. I am delighted with that.
We have the investments in the environment, Kyoto and climate change, and the extraordinary investments in the parks. I noticed last week that the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans announced Canada's first real under-ocean park. People tend not to realize that we are responsible for 50% more of the huge land area we are very conscious of. In three oceans we are responsible for the under-ocean areas. In this budget provision is being made for marine parks, as well as an expansion of our wonderful system of national parks.
We also have the investment in foreign aid. I was so pleased to see us at this time, when people are viewing Iraq and thinking in terms of war, that we would once again, at last, increase our contribution to foreign aid, particularly to Africa, and to countries which have been devastated by AIDS.
As I said, my main purpose this afternoon is to talk about education, training and research in the budget. It is interesting that measures in this area of education and training and of research pervades most parts of the budget. It is interesting and perhaps surprising to some people but if, for example, we think of health care, it is important right now to deliver health care to the sick. However if we do not have research and we do not have proper education and training, in the end the system will founder. We have to keep training.
We have a shortage of physicians. One of the ways to solve that is to train more physicians. We have a shortage of nurses, particularly nurses of certain types. The way to solve that is through education and training. If we do not have research the diseases that face us will always face us.
One of the highlights of my life was a short conversation I had with Terry Fox in 1980 when I was involved with the Cancer Society in Peterborough. I asked him why he was so insistent that the money he raised go to research. He had no idea of the amounts that would be raised in his name following his sad death. He told me that he had good care when he had cancer in his leg and that he knew people would support everyone receiving good care. “However”, Terry Fox said, “money has to go into research because there will always be people with cancer like mine”.
We have been fortunate in Canada. We have been able to improve the health care system looking after people but at the same time we have had the Terry Fox fund putting money into cancer research.
It is education and research that puts sustainability in our system. The system depends on having educated Canadians. We are already the most educated country in the world by many measures, and that is the way to maintain our health care system, to improve our environment, to have the best agriculture and the best economy in the world. I am going to speak about education, training and research in the budget.
In one of the budget documents--I know, Mr. Speaker, you have read it from cover to cover--there is table 5.1. This is quite a remarkable table. I know we do not have visual aids here but I wish we did. In the place where I used to work we always used them but I know it is not allowed in the House.
Table 5.1 is very interesting. It lays out the years 1998 to 2005. For each of those years it shows what has been spent and what will be spent in various areas of research and innovation. Down the side it lists some of the examples of spending in that six-year period.
It shows what has already been spent and what will be spent by the Canada Foundation for Innovation which funds equipment particularly in research hospitals, colleges and universities.
It lists Genome Canada, which supports genetics research. Canada is in the top three in genetics research in the world.
There is also the Canada research chairs, 2,000 fully funded research chairs. There was a time when there were only 169 fully funded research chairs in Canada and then overnight, because of this government, that number became 2,169.
The funding for what used to be called the Medical Research Council, now the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, has been doubled in recent years.
The table lists the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, which funds most of the heavy science research; the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, which funds the invaluable social science work that we do; the networks of centres of excellence, something created by this government; the Atlantic innovation fund, which supports fundamental and applied research in the Atlantic provinces; biotechnology research; government online; and connectedness, which includes that wonderful program that puts every elementary school and high school in the country on the Internet.
That list is down one side of the table. Across the top are the years and the amounts of funding. During those years that I mentioned, the funding in those areas alone has gone from $400 million to $11 billion. This truly is an investment in the future of our country.
I see the members of the opposition sitting, waiting to ask me questions. This truly is an area that the Prime Minister himself has said there are no votes. In the crass sense, there are no votes in this. Even the professors across the country we give the Canada research chairs to will not vote for us for this reason, although they may well vote for us. This is something that a government should do. This is a far seeing thing, just like Terry Fox saying, “We need to look after the people who have cancer now, but we have to invest in cancer research for the future so people will no longer have it”. This is what the government has done, and table 5.1 is an extraordinary illustration of that.
I want to go through some of the areas, some which I have mentioned already and some which I have not. There are other investments in education, research and training which are not mentioned in that table.
First would be the granting councils and I summarized them before. I mentioned the former Medical Research Council. Funding in medical research has doubled in the last several years. Total funding for those councils is now around $1.5 billion. It is going into basic research in colleges, universities and institutes across the country. I am glad to see that gradually the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, which does social science research which has often been neglected, is beginning to get more of its share.
One of my colleagues mentioned something which is not in that table but which was mentioned so clearly in the budget, the special announcement of the Canada graduate scholarships.
I mentioned the 2,000 Canada research chairs, which are extraordinary things. Trent University in my riding has eight of them. The federal government is funding eight full professors with their research at a tiny university, Trent University.
To follow through with that, if we think about research professors and highly qualified researchers in laboratories and hospitals across the country, they are at the top of the pyramid. It is true we could import people to take their places but if in the end we do not have a pyramid starting with prenatal, going on to early childhood development, going on to quality elementary schools, quality child care, quality high school and then quality undergraduate and graduate schools, if we do not have all of those in all the many areas concerned, in the future we will not have the system that we have now. It will not be sustainable.
With regard to the Canada graduate scholarships, a group of MPs with whom I am associated, the government caucus on post-secondary education and research, asked that the federal government consider scholarships for undergraduate students in addition to the millennium scholarships we now provide.
When we think about it, if the federal government is to intervene in the system, the quickest way to get results is near the top of the undergraduate program for research and for new positions and things of that type at the bottom of the graduate schools. Of the Canada graduate scholarships, 4,000 of them fully funded, 2,000 are for masters students and 2,000 are for doctoral students. Immediately as this money flows we will be strengthening the graduate schools and strengthening Canada's capacity to produce researchers and professionals, for example, veterinarians, medical doctors and the like.
I was delighted to see that 60% of those scholarships are going to the social sciences and will be administered by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. I am pleased about that. It is my hope that in future we will fund more undergraduate scholarships.
The indirect costs of research, which is not mentioned in the table, is something that is very critical for universities and colleges conducting research across the country. The indirect costs of research sounds a bit obscure but it particularly affects small institutions.
When a small institution has a wonderful, highly qualified, world class researcher and he or she receives a $1 million grant to conduct a project, the small institution has to find some rooms for the assistants and for the equipment for this person. The small institution receives the $1 million. It is kind of a white elephant because it costs so much to support that person. Indirect costs of research address that problem.
I am delighted that having tried it as an experiment last year, the federal government is now committed to three years with a good review at the end of the three years to cover the indirect costs of research. The allocation system that will be used for distributing those funds has a bias not toward the larger institutions which already benefit well from many of our programs, but to the smaller institutions. I am delighted to see it in there. It is a substantial amount of money.
Northern science is mentioned in the budget but not in the table. There is a considerable increase, $16 million, to northern science. My colleagues in our caucus and I are very pleased about that, but there are two things. One is it is not enough. The second is we believe there should be a more coordinated and focused approach to northern science, the way we are trying to be more accountable for example in health care and in our allocations to the provinces.
We believe the federal government has a special responsibility in the north, not interfering with the jurisdiction of the territories at all, but that it has a special responsibility for research and higher education there, and we should be more focused in our efforts. We hope the government this time in its increased funding to northern research gave additional moneys to the polar continental shelf research project, which is the aircraft support system for research in the Arctic islands. In particular, we are glad of that.
Next time the government should give consideration to the national scientific training program, NSTP. It is the program that supports undergraduates and graduates learning about how to do northern research. That goes back to my point about sustainability of the system.
I mentioned the Canada Foundation for Innovation. It is extraordinary. That foundation, set up by the government and as shown in the table, has given away over $3 billion to hospitals, colleges and universities. I am particularly pleased that from its inception it decided to deal with colleges and Cegeps. In the past the federal government has not done that.
The remarkable thing about Genome Canada is that it operates regionally. My regret is that we have supported Genome Canada and its various projects and it is my hope that in the future we will support animal genetics as much as we have supported research into plants and human genetics.
I mentioned SchoolNet. I mentioned aboriginal students. I am very pleased about that support.
Even though I look to our having a sustainable system of education, training and research, I am glad that the government is investing money in the more rapid and effective assessment and recognition of foreign credentials. Many immigrants come to our shores. They do not expect to walk into a highly qualified workplace and function straight away. However they find too many barriers and the budget is dealing with that.
Last, with regard to access to education, I am delighted with the improvements to the Canada student loans program.