Mr. Speaker, I am presenting a petition calling on the Government of Canada to restore funding to the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences.
The petitioners want the government to know that interruptions in funding for climate sciences may cause experts to leave Canada and some research groups to be shut down. It takes decades to develop such groups, and their disappearance would not only negate the important investments of time and money made in the past but would also be wasteful if ongoing research projects could not run their course. Furthermore, the loss of Canadian expertise in climate science would decrease our ability to predict climate change and to adapt, all in the middle of the warmest winter in history in many areas of Canada.
The Conservative government must not send us back to the times of Galileo, when scientific dogma was imposed by the authorities.