Mr. Speaker, what I would like to talk about today is health and safety. The point I want to make is that the Conservative government cannot be trusted with the health and safety of our families and our children. I hope that the parliamentary secretary will be able to address this issue.
It comes up in a survey that was released last week on the subject of the muzzling of federal scientists. This is a subject that has been discussed for a number of years. When it is brought up the government says there is a lot of money spent on science by the federal government, and there are a lot of papers published by federal scientists. Then it dismisses reports of the muzzling of federal scientists and the fact that they are not able to speak freely. It says a lot of papers are published and federal scientists are not being muzzled.
Counter to that, there is some very significant anecdotal evidence of scientists not being able to speak freely or on a timely basis with the media or the public. What came out last week was a survey performed by Environics. The survey had roughly 4,000 respondents, all federal scientists. It gives some hard data to back up what we are finding from anecdotal evidence. One conclusion of this survey is that 90% of the 4,000 respondents said that they could not speak freely about their research. This is just like the salmon scientists who could not speak freely to journalists or to the public about salmon genetics, which is a very strange thing given the fact that Canadian taxpayers have paid for that research.
If you push the government a bit with all these anecdotes about the fact that it is kind of silly that scientists cannot simply talk about their research about the natural world, the next thing the government will say is that the scientists work for the government. The Minister of State for Science and Technology has essentially made this point. They work for the government and they have to work according to the rules that the Conservative government has set up, just like someone doing research for a company has to work by the rules of the company they work for. The problem with that is really exposed by the results of the survey, which says that half of federal scientists have found that the health and safety of Canadians has been compromised by political interference.
Let me quote the report that came out. I will extract the important parts of the quote. It states:
Half of federal scientists...report being aware of actual cases in which the health and safety of Canadians...has been compromised because of political interference with their scientific work. ...in which their department or agency suppressed information....
That is the problem. That is why we cannot say the scientists work for the government so they have to obey the Conservative government's rules. It affects health and safety. Two thousand federal scientists are saying they know of cases where the health and safety of Canadians is compromised.
What I would like to say to Canadians tonight is that they cannot trust the safety of their children, of their family, to the government.
I began my question last week during question period by saying that middle-class Canadians expect the government to ensure safe and healthy communities in which to raise their children. That actually came from the throne speech. What I am saying is that the government's concern for health and safety is not real. It cannot be trusted with the safety of our children and our families.