Well, that wouldn't be a hard bar to clear, but I thank you very much for inviting me and indeed for inviting me back to present a perspective that is perhaps different from that of the previous witness.

You're gathered here to ponder the impact of the criteria for awarding federal funding on research excellence in Canada, and I'm here to urge you to get rid of them, and also all of the funding involved, rather than refining the criteria.

I say this for two reasons.

The first is that you, as members of Parliament, are the critical link between citizens and the whole political process. In the massive apparatus of government, you are the only people we choose, and you have core duties that you must attend to, which, at the moment—not to be uncivil—are being carried out very badly. You need to be peering into the public accounts, not the test tubes.

The second point—and those of you who were here for the first try will know this—is related to the fact that I come from an academic family. Both of my parents are professors, as well as my uncle and two cousins. My grandfather was not just a professor; he was an expert on the evolution of Parliament. My quotation of the day online today, in fact, is from him.

Our universities are in a mess today, and one of the primary reasons is that they've become creatures of the state. Of course, it may be occurring to some of you that education is in fact constitutionally provincial, and you're right. Nevertheless, the federal government somehow seems to spend something on the order of $15 billion a year on post-secondary education, and I don't think it's doing much good.

More to the point, when I speak of your core duties, the first one I want to mention is the national finances. Solvency is a critical thing, yet we are facing massive deficits. We just got this weird Christmas tax break that's apparently going to save each of us $4.51 and cost firms millions to administer. I urge you to put aside genetic codes and look at the tax code.

An even greater responsibility is the defence of the realm. I'm just drawing here on very recent news stories. Canada is defenceless in the Arctic. We have no assets there worthy of the name. In fact, we are generally defenceless in an increasingly dangerous world.

Again, I tell you to forget about antimatter and get us some ammunition and somebody capable of firing it.

Another critical federal responsibility is infrastructure. A news story revealed that Via Rail is getting subsidies exceeding $1,000 a passenger, but it can't make the trains run on time. Then some minister was promising, finally, a human right to clean drinking water for first nations and long-term sustainable funding for generations. What we really have is boil water advisories for generations. I say to forget heavy water and fix the tap water.

Then there was the story about the Federal Court maybe having to curtail hearings because they have such a funding shortfall. Nothing is more fundamental to peace, order and good government than justice—except defence—but justice is collapsing as well in this country. You could wait almost a year just to get a hearing on a traffic ticket. I assure you that's true. This is happening even though federal spending has ballooned from under $300 billion a decade ago to over half a trillion today, the national debt is over a trillion dollars and the federal public service is up a baffling 40%.

You as MPs need to make this stuff stop. Never mind inventing a Canadian bilingual chatbot. I do think there's a certain irony in the fact that the hearings fell apart last time because we couldn't actually manage translation. Is there anything that the federal government ought to be more on top of than that?

You know, I would say more about the universities, but time is short. Bruce Pardy and Heather Exner-Pirot both spoke about that. I want to come back to this point that you should leave education to the provinces. It's bad enough with them in charge.

When you cut, if you cut the spending—I'm talking about that $15 billion, to end on a slightly more cheerful note—take about a billion dollars of it and buy yourself some staff. I worked on Capitol Hill almost 30 years ago and I discovered that the congressional U.S. House of Representatives' budget committee alone had about 100 staff. Representatives have close to 20 each. Senators have dozens; a lot of them are doing administrative or constituency work, but they have five or 10 full-time policy people to keep them on top of what's happening.

Here, you're looking at five staff in total. I'll tell you what: Cabinet, the party leaders and the bureaucracy do not want MPs on top of issues, because it makes you less docile. They want to distract you, and this issue today is a distraction. Laser beams? That's for cats to chase.

We citizens need legislators who are focused on fundamentals, not cold fusion, because right now, in the central responsibilities—