Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for his intervention in the debate this afternoon.
Over the last number of years we have seen a number of concerns come up around funding for research. We have seen increasing pressure on people doing research in Canada to ensure that their work can be easily commercialized. There has been this whole trend toward the commercialization of research.
We have also seen, certainly around this place, members of Parliament, often from the Conservative Party or its predecessors, the Reform Party, questioning a lot of the curiosity based research that is done in Canada, especially research in the arts and in the humanities where they have often thrown contempt on some of those research projects, mainly by often rehearsing and reciting the titles of certain works that they somehow think are not deserving of research support.
We have also seen recently the Canadian Association of University Teachers calling into question the distribution of research money based on priorities established by politicians and not through scientific merits. The scientists are not as directly involved in this and the latest budget is another indication of the government setting research priorities that have not gone through a rigorous process of determining their scientific merit.
I wonder if the member might comment on the importance of research based on scientific merit.