Mr. Speaker, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation put up $5.2 million for tobacco control at the International Development Research Centre. However, when the foundation discovered that a board member of the IDRC was also on the board of Imperial Tobacco, it sent a letter expressing this blatant conflict of interest. After no response from the government, it pulled the funding.
Why did the government show such little respect to the largest philanthropic organization in the world? Was it incompetence or indifference?