Madam Speaker, it is not a problem that the government is encouraging industry-academic collaboration in trying to make our Canadian businesses as competitive as possible. That is good for Canada, but it is clear that the government is doing it at the expense of basic research, notwithstanding what the minister has said. We heard it from all the scientists who have written in to comment and strongly disagree with what the Minister of State for Science and Technology is saying.
It clear from the budget, for example, of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, that the funding for basic research through discovery grants has been going down every year. It is a shift in priorities towards funding research to work on immediate problems of industry and decreasing funding for work on basic research, which is the kind of research that would produce discoveries that we need to have in a pipeline of discoveries, to help Canada prosper in the decades to come and not just in the next few years.