Mr. Speaker, this is along the lines of what the last questioner mentioned and it is for the ears of the government members as much as it is for my hon. friend here.
What does the absence of investing in Genome Canada, the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research mean? If we look at what is happening south of the border, President Obama is making a huge investment in these areas. He knows that research and development has a huge multiplier effect.
What that is going to mean for us is that with this huge investment by the United States we are going to see a loss of the brain trust that we have in our country, a loss of years of being able to draw in some of the best and brightest minds we have seen in health care, in the sciences and in engineering.
Starting in late 1990s the then-Liberal government made a huge change and made a huge investment in research and development which brought our country from being about sixteenth in the world up to about third or fourth in the world.
I would like to ask my friend, does he not think that this gross omission in this budget puts the hard work that we have done to get some of the best and brightest minds in our country in science, research and engineering in the sciences at risk? We will lose large numbers of some of the best and brightest researchers in the world, which is going to cause a really massive structural problem and a deficit for our economy.
We need the huge multiplier effect that is produced in science and engineering. It improves our economy significantly. This absence, this omission is really going to compromise our economy in a big way.