Madam Speaker, I am happy to speak to Motion No. 38 today, which has been brought forward by the member for Etobicoke North. It calls for the creation of a new standing committee in the House of Commons, the science and research committee. I know the strong interest and deep concern that the member has for science and research. She is a scientist herself, and I had the pleasure of accompanying her to a G7 meeting on science in Italy when she was Canada's minister of science.
Science is important. Its impacts are pervasive in society, from cellphones to sewage treatments, from vaccines to velcro and from athletics to architecture. It is everywhere. Sometimes I think we forget that it is there, like not seeing the forest for the trees. We forget how much we depend on it for everything. Society in general takes it for granted, and politicians take it for granted too. In recent years, we have been seeing a steady rise in disinformation, especially on social media, about climate, the pandemic and vaccines. There is clearly a place for more support to science so that it can give us the facts on a myriad of subjects.
I am very pleased to see this motion before us today, and I am very pleased to say that I fully support it and the NDP will be supporting it.
Right now, when issues centred on science come to the House of Commons, they are studied in the industry committee, and because of that, the very few studies the committee undertakes that are directly related to science are focused on how science can directly help industry. I would like to emphasize that even though science is such an important topic, we almost never study it directly in any committee here. There is nothing that talks about what the federal government can do to stimulate basic science, nothing that talks about how we can make participation in science more inclusive and nothing that talks about how we could better use science in our policy development. I could go on and on.
For full disclosure, I come from a science background as well. I am a biologist. I worked at the University of B.C. for 17 years or so, and after that I was a consultant for 20 years before ending up here as an MP. I entered politics because I felt that we needed more scientific voices in Parliament. That feeling was especially strong during the last Conservative government, the Harper years. I personally saw my colleagues who worked as scientists in the federal civil service being muzzled and not allowed to speak about their work.
I remember one big webinar in 2012, a global webinar before COVID made that a cool thing, about a report on the state of Canada's birds. This groundbreaking report had been written almost entirely by two brilliant Environment Canada scientists using data gathered from thousands of volunteer citizen scientists. I was working for Bird Studies Canada at the time and helped design, promote and operate those continent-wide data-gathering programs. At the webinar, the two federal scientists were allowed to give a short prevetted overview of the findings on the population trends of hundreds of bird species, and then the government media person opened it up to questions, pointing out that the authors would not be allowed to answer those questions. I had to step in and field media questions even though I had not done the analyses or written the report. It was ridiculous, and there are many more examples of that sort of situation with government scientists not being allowed to explain the findings of their research.
There was also the infamous case of DFO research libraries being closed and their books being thrown into dumpsters. One of my former colleagues, Dr. Jeff Hutchings, a fisheries biologist from Dalhousie University, wrote an important paper on the ecology of the northern cod in 1993. A lot of the information he used came from grey literature survey reports that he found in the Department of Fisheries and Oceans library in St. John's. He found them by looking at every report on the shelf in that part of the library. The Harper government claimed that all those reports were digitized before being thrown out, but it is clear that they were not. Dr. Hutchings tells me that he could not write that report today. That important historical information has been lost and cannot be found in any PDF.
I am happy to say that I think things have improved somewhat and that the present government takes science more seriously than the previous government did. I will point out that the member for Etobicoke North created the chief science advisor position, whose mandate it is to advise cabinet on scientific matters. That is a step in the right direction, but what we really need is a truly independent parliamentary science officer, just as we have a Parliamentary Budget Officer. It would be an office that all parliamentarians, MPs and senators, not just the cabinet, could turn to for unbiased scientific advice, just as we can ask the PBO to assess the financial aspects of various programs or proposals. My former colleague Kennedy Stewart, now the mayor of Vancouver, put that proposal forward in previous Parliaments, but unfortunately it was never taken up.
The federal government puts a lot of money directly into science and research, over $4 billion from what I can determine, so it is incumbent upon us in the House to know how that money is spent, how it could perhaps be better used or how it perhaps should be increased.
In 2017, the Naylor report on fundamental science was tabled by the member for Etobicoke North. I was then the NDP critic for post-secondary education, and I heard very positive reviews from university representatives. The Naylor report made 10 main recommendations to increase and coordinate funding to basic research. Four years later, only one of those recommendations has been fully completed, six are partially addressed or still in progress and three have not been done at all. Therefore, a study on the implementation of the Naylor report would be very illuminating, just the kind of thing a standing committee on science and research could take on.
Another useful study would be one on inclusion in Canada's research sector. I am afraid I am only too typical of the standard Canadian scientist, an older white male. We have been hearing for years how we have to encourage women and girls to enter the sciences. When I taught an ecology course at UBC one or two decades ago, we had a very high proportion of female students, but that was not the situation across the board in other fields of studies such as engineering and physics. That situation has been improving. Many women are entering those fields, but for many years there has also been a systemic bias against women in science and research, and many were frustrated by the lack of success and advancement or in obtaining research grants. Thankfully, even that phenomenon seems to be getting better and the trajectory is definitely toward gender equity.
This past year, we have heard a lot and learned a lot from the Black Lives Matter movement and the more general barriers facing racialized people in our society. I have been very inspired by the stories I have seen in the media and online about young Black scientists and indigenous scientists who talk about the struggles they face in a field where no one looks like them. Their persistence and passion for science is really an example for all of us. Therefore, inclusion in science and research is another critical issue that a standing committee could study.
To have any intelligent debate, indeed to have a functional democracy, we have to agree among ourselves on basic facts, but often those standard baselines are hard to find.
In the natural resources committee in the previous Parliament, we did a study on how we should have an independent, unbiased, timely, comprehensive source of energy data in Canada. Some of that was being done by the National Energy Board at the time, but it was anything but comprehensive, timely or unbiased. I felt we should have a completely independent agency similar to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Even a dedicated part of Statistics Canada would be better than what we have now. However, two or three years later, as far as I know, nothing has been accomplished along those lines. Therefore, a dedicated science committee could look at all aspects of public data availability in Canada.
I will finish with a quote from Timothy Caulfield from the faculty of law at the University of Alberta. In 2017, he said in The Globe and Mail, “We need more science. We need better science. We need trustworthy science. We need agenda-free science.
The House of Commons in particular and Canada in general would benefit greatly from a standing committee focused on science and research, and I will be supporting this motion.