Mr. Speaker, I heard the member say “let us have a look at the records”. There could not be anything more public than the records of these foundations. These are very sophisticated organizations working in a very sophisticated and important part of our society. They have websites which are the best in the country, designed by the best people in the country. My colleague can go and see every grant and he can see the administrative expenses and so on.
As my colleague has explained, these foundations regularly appear before parliamentary committees. Partly because, in my view, they understand that in this very fine way, as the Auditor General has quite rightly said, they do not have to report to Parliament, they go to great lengths to go to parliamentary committees. I would recommend to any member of the House to phone one of them and there will be a faster response than from any of our government departments, which are in theory fully responsible for this House.
I wanted to apologize for a mistake I made in my last intervention. I misspoke myself. I said that nobody on the Conservative side had defended this critical area of public policy. It truly is critical. People do remember the brain drain, but it is now a thing of the past. If Canada does not keep up and maintain its intellectual capacity we cannot keep up in the productivity race around the world. We have done so; there has been a revolution since these foundations.
My question to the member is this. I misspoke myself because one member of the Conservative Party, Preston Manning, was a big supporter of these things and the party over there kicked him out. Would my colleague not agree that Preston Manning was the last real defender on that side of this important area of public policy?