Ottawa’s corrosive plan for socially just science

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For the past decade, Ottawa politicized research funding: Liberal ministers pledged to embed diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) into research practices while bringing diversity targets to the sector; they even said outright that federal funds would be used to tinker with the demographics within the research ecosystem.

And now, in 2024, the House of Commons is finally hearing about it. In October, the science committee kicked off a study on the impact of government funding requirements on Canadian research, and, for once, invited a slate of witnesses who don’t bow to DEI dogma.

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The now-widespread practice of requiring researchers to submit statements affirming their commitment to DEI with their applications for jobs and grants incentivizes lying, Prof. Geoff Horsman, a Wilfrid Laurier University biochemist, told the committee in early December. Some grant applications even evaluate socioeconomic and environmental impacts — which is open to the interpretation of those granting the funds.

Prof. Yuan Yi Zhu, an international law professor at the Netherlands’ Leiden University, made a similar point in November, telling the committee that he advises non-progressive students to keep their views to themselves until funding is secured.

“Within Canadian academia, there is a monoculture where, if you deviate even very slightly from what is fashionable and what is commonly accepted by your peers, not only will you be ostracized, but often you will not be able to have an academic career in the first place,” Zhu said. Federal research funding contributes to the problem by targeting identity over excellence in certain cases, as well as its expectation that applicants “promote specific ideological objectives such as (DEI).”

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The monoculture was the focus of Prof. Christopher Dummitt at Trent University, who found in a recent study that 88 per cent of academia identified as left-leaning. He testified in November that this was not just a “partisan concern” but a “concern that matters towards the purpose of higher education as a truth-seeking and truth-validating research enterprise.” Federal funding, despite being diversity-obsessed in recent years, has completely ignored viewpoint diversity.

At the same time, Prof. Eric Kaufmann of the University of Buckingham pointed out that most Canadians prefer a colour-blind approach to deciding who gets what. The less-favoured non-colour-blind approach, on the other hand, risks jeopardizing the legitimacy of whatever research is at hand.

And even though she supported the idea of DEI in general, Heather Exner-Pirot, energy director at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, told the committee in December that DEI has gone too far by narrowing what research is done in the country.

Together, they described an environment of injustice and conformity — cultivated in part by the ideologically guided hand of the federal government through its research funding agencies. It’s just not fair.

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It’s a far cry from the other side of the spectrum that embraces DEI.

A great living example can be found at the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), nestled within the Memorial University of Newfoundland. It studies plastic pollution, food systems and citizen science.

More interesting than the lab’s scientific output, however, is its sheer volume of ideological production. Self-described as a feminist, anticolonial “methods incubator,” the lab works ”towards humility, accountability, collectivity, and good land relations (anticolonialism) in everything” it does. It emphasizes collectivity and provides guidelines on colonialism and equity in author order (authors of academic papers are typically listed in order of importance). The lab book, a tome of about 90 pages, is more of a collectivist manifesto that explains how to apply nearly every progressive belief one can think of to a life of lab work.

“Field work” and “crazy” are discouraged words due to their colonial and ableist natures, respectively. Consensus-based decision-making is embraced. There is an apology protocol. Personal introductions must come with gender pronouns and “land relations” to declare the impact of colonialism on one’s life. Lab members are encouraged to mind their “trauma manners” when speaking about racism, genocide and sexual violence. Pronoun checks are performed.

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And if someone isn’t feeling well in any sense, they should stay home.

“Dominant (capitalist) culture reinforces the idea that working through illness, pain, and discomfort is a moral thing to do, a sign of good character,” reads the lab book. “But this sets up a sacrifice economy, where people sacrifice their own wellness (mental, physical, spiritual, relational) for work. CLEAR isn’t a place where that kind of sacrifice is expected or rewarded.”

As is the case with many progressive initiatives, it derives the largest portion of its funding from the federal government: the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), with some additional grant money coming from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). The science is tenuous, and the assistant professor who heads the lab considers science to be both a way to improve the Earth and a discipline burdened by colonialism and entitlement.

As for actual knowledge production at the lab, federal grants have backed projects such as “Placing science: implementing feminist, Indigenous, and decolonial theories of place and land in the laboratory” ($300,000).

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Academic absurdities elsewhere include the $164,000 federal grant to a project out of Concordia University named “Decolonizing Light: Tracing and countering colonialism in contemporary physics.” Specifically, it was supported by the federal New Frontiers in Research Fund which is supposed to be aimed at, but evidently does not always hit, high-risk and high-reward work. The same fund supported a Dalhousie University project named “Creating vocabularies and rituals for climate grief through multiple knowledge systems and the artistic process,” which was cast as having some kind of relevance to biological and earth sciences.

Concordia, meanwhile, drew $22 million from the same program for a study called “Indigenous-Led AI: How Indigenous Knowledge Systems Could Push AI to be More Inclusive.” One Maori researcher on the project, linguist Hēmi Whaanga, explained that it aims to “mobilize AI technology to explore the centrality of hapū (kinship group) and connection in creative, language, cultural and well-being contexts.”

These are the extremes. Most labs in Canada aren’t borderline hippie communes, and most studies still ground themselves in the intellectual tradition that is western science. They are under threat, however, because the values embraced by these projects resonate just as strongly with people in the high rungs of funding decision-making. If Canadians want to keep science clear from the ideology of diversity, equity and inclusion and activist scholarship, it’s up to them to fix it.

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Unlike the rest of the developed world, Canadian research is largely a government initiative. At the federal level, the holy trinity of funding bodies is made up of SSHRC, to support the arts, NSERC, to support science and engineering, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), which supports health. Collectively, the three are known as the Tri-Agency, and they hand out roughly $3 billion per year.

The Tri-Agency therefore concentrates power over research direction in Ottawa. Provincial funding exists, too, but the feds tend to hold the upper hand. The University of British Columbia, for example, derives a plurality of its research budget from the federal government, 30 per cent, from the Tri-Agency; 32.7 per cent comes from other government sources, with another 29.2 per cent coming from non-profit sources. Only eight per cent of UBC’s research is industry-funded. Each university will break down a bit differently, but you get the idea. Universities tend to rely on government for their budgets.

Government disproportionately drives research in Canada, not because it’s spending more money than everyone else — it isn’t — but because industry seems to avoid Canada like the plague. The Canadian Council of Academies cites a number of reasons for this: large firms in Canada seem to fund research less than large firms elsewhere; manufacturing, which drives a lot of private research funding, is a much smaller share of the economy here compared to elsewhere; resource extraction, which is strong in Canada, doesn’t usually require as much research and development.

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Canada’s sectors that have been major research funders — telecom and pharma — have declined over the past decades, as well. This means less private funding overall.

In other research hubs (France, Germany, Japan, South Korea and the United States), the primary stakeholder is the private sector. Those governments can’t hold their researchers to an ideological standard as easily. This hasn’t completely insulated their universities from ideological shift — American universities created and embraced DEI, after all — but their choice to take up politics is often made of their own volition.

Here, it’s a different story. When a government assumes power and seeks to drive social change, it can guide the universities into motion by appointing change agents to funding boards. And when activists in the social sciences demand change for the entire research environment, the government can respond by caving to their demands entirely, and make rules that affect nearly everyone.

When did it all start going south? An easy place to trace it back to is a human rights complaint.

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In 2003, six professors approached the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal alleging a nasty case of systemic discrimination by then-named Industry Canada, the federal department overseeing research: Marjorie Griffin Cohen, Louise Forsyth, Glenis Joyce, Audrey Kobayashi, Shree Mulay, Michele Ollivier, Susan Prentice and Wendy Robbins.

These professors targeted the newly established, $900-million Canada Research Chairs (CRC) program in their complaint, which had kicked off in 2000. The point of the program was to give stable, substantial funding to best-in-class professors so that they could produce better work long-term. The awards came with a certain level of prestige — only the best received them, after all.

The human rights complaint had little to do with overt sexism and racism in the CRC program — instead, their qualm was with the absence of a plan to combat sexism and racism if it were there. Without equity procedures in place, they presumed the program was discriminatory, contravening the Canadian Human Rights Act and its requirement for all federal legislation to ensure people are given equal opportunities without “being hindered in or prevented from doing so” by discrimination on protected grounds. The complainants thus wanted the CRC program to adhere to equity mandates, similar to those of the Employment Equity Act.

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Only one of the six complainants, was in the physical sciences. Griffin Cohen, a feminist economist, was a member of Simon Fraser University’s departments of political science and women’s studies. Forsyth, whose career focused on drama and poetry, was part of the University of Saskatchewan’s women’s studies department.

Joyce, also from the U of S, hailed from another branch of women’s studies. Kobayashi was a Queen’s University professor in geography and women’s studies. Ollivier and Prentice were sociologists housed at the University of Ottawa and the University of Manitoba, respectively. Robbins came from English and women’s studies at the University of New Brunswick.

The only complainant with some relevance to science was Mulay, who was the director of the McGill Centre for Research and Teaching on Women. A medical researcher of reproductive health, Mulay studied, among many other things, pregnancy — from the fluid balance in a pregnant woman’s body, to diabetic pregnancies in rats, to chemical sterilization of women in India, to reproductive technology.

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An impressive record, to be sure. But should it have been enough to transform an affirmative action program across the entire research space, from computer science to robotics to engineering? Hardly.

Still, the complainants wanted quotas for the entire CRC program. It was an ask that wasn’t too far off-base: by the early 2000s, the federal bureaucracy had somewhat normalized affirmative action. Since the 1980s, it, and its Crown corporations and its contractors were beholden to the Employment Equity Act, which mandated diversity targets set according to the workplace availability of women, visible minorities, Indigenous people and the disabled (the feds committed to adding categories for Black and LGBT people in 2023, but have yet to formally do so). Nowadays, the privileged categories often receive preferential treatment in hiring. Any shortfall of the “targets” results in complaints that the legislation is not being properly followed, another indication that proponents expect strict adherence.

And so, with the law already headed in the same direction way, the arguments for a quota-bound CRC program were made:

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“University research is a fundamental policy source for the Canadian government…. As such, the failure to ensure that the interests and needs of the diverse Canadian mosaic are reflected in research and research policy will more likely than not result in further marginalization of Canadian minorities,” the complainants argued.

“The failure of the CRC program to require that the Chairs are selected and appointed in a manner which gives voice to diversity and expands knowledge and policy beyond the existing power elite and interests of a patriarchal international (globalization) policy, precludes equitable treatment of minority interests and issues and allows the recipient universities to maintain the status quo of disadvantage.”

Other instances of systemic sexism, the complainants argued, came from the fact that the most lucrative tier of CRC grant was only open to full professors. While there’s nothing inherently sexist about the idea that experienced, higher-level researchers should be eligible for longer-term funding, they argued that because most full professors were male, any program that privileges full professors is sexist. Similarly, the program was also considered sexist because more CRC seats were dedicated to the sciences than the humanities, and women were more densely concentrated in the humanities.

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The arguments, of course, were and remain tenuous. The social sciences require less funding because they don’t require the use of expensive particle colliders, electron microscopes, RNA extraction reagents and months of clinical trials, as hard sciences often do. And the fact that most full professors in 2003 were male, is, well, exactly what one would expect considering the male-dominated demographics of the undergraduate crop from decades earlier.

The case never made it to an actual tribunal, and the arguments had no opportunity to be properly litigated. Instead, the government caved to the demands of the feminists in 2006 with a court settlement that committed to a system of Employment-Equity-Act-like requirements for the CRC program, under the Liberal government of Paul Martin.

Little changed, however. So, in 2018, with receptive Liberals safely in power, one complainant complained to a House of Commons committee on women about the lack of progress achieved post-2003 settlement. She accused the federal government of failing to hold up its end of the bargain, lamenting that universities faced no punishment for not pursuing equity. She raised an additional reason that quotas were essential: skin-deep appearances. The program needed to look a certain way to be legitimate, she believed.

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“A vast number of ‘experts’ are regularly asked by the media to weigh in on events that occur in our country. Quite often, these experts are Research Chairs,” she wrote. “The lack of diversity within the Program means that the opinions expressed by these experts may well be unrepresentative and biased.”

In 2019, coincidentally under another Liberal government, the complainants succeeded in getting an even better deal: hard quotas. Facing complaints that the old settlement wasn’t being properly adhered to, the federal government conceded to new terms that required CRC awards to be allocated according to population statistics.

The CRC program’s website now has more menu options dedicated to diversity than it does science, and universities throughout the country actively exclude candidates based on race, sex and disability status to adhere to the program’s strict quota. Top-tier researchers do benefit from the program, but it’s hard to hold it in high esteem when it doubles as an affirmative action program.

Now, in 2024, there’s no end in sight. The CRC program has met half of its identity quotas, and is close to meeting the rest. Nevertheless, SSHRC president Ted Hewitt, who is responsible for administering the CRC program, informed a Commons committee in May that he has no plans to ease off.

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Since that 2003 settlement, and especially since the 2019 renegotiated settlement, Canada has made diversity its North Star when it comes to research policy. Rather than simple excellence, the priority is inclusive excellence. Rather than trying to solve the private-sector aversion to supporting original research and encouraging economic investment, the federal strategy is to use funding to manipulate universities and scientists into advancing activist work.

Universities Canada took up the mantle of diversity in 2017, committing as a collective to DEI, “inclusive excellence” and the advancement of “under-represented groups” (defined as: women, visible minorities, Aboriginal peoples, disabled people, LGBT people and men in female-dominated disciplines).

That same year, the feds established the Canada Research Coordinating Committee (CRCC), its goals including a commitment to “make equity, diversity and inclusion hallmarks of research excellence,” according to a 2019 progress report. Policies of focus included introducing unconscious bias training for all reviewers and staff, mandatory training for the federal social justice policy tool known as Gender-based Analysis Plus (GBA+) for policy and program staff and collecting demographic data of researchers. Grants were handed out to assist the DEI “transformation” in small higher education institutions, accounting for up to $200,000 per year for two years for DEI development.

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“Significant efforts are needed to identify and eliminate systemic barriers to the inclusion and advancement of underrepresented groups within institutional policies, practices and cultures,” reads the 2019 report. “Such efforts require time for self-assessment, allocating resources, adjusting job descriptions and promotion processes, reviewing research policies, collecting data and producing benchmarks and analyses.”

In 2018, the Tri-Council advanced a DEI strategic plan. Goals included a vast data collection campaign to record the diversity of program applicants, peer reviewers, selection committees and governance boards. It aimed to totalize DEI in everything, aligning “all policies, plans, programs and policies” for allocating support to research are “equitable and inclusive, and mitigate bias against underrepresented groups.” Committees making decisions regarding research and governance were to be “inclusive and (reflecting of) Canada’s diversity.”

By 2019, it’s no surprise the government happily signed off on an updated court order in Federal Court to impose tight identity quotas on the CRC program. It didn’t matter that a few activists were using the court process to turn a $300-million research program into a 20th-century-style affirmative action program. The Liberals wanted that exact kind of program because it would reinforce the identity-based research agenda they wanted to pursue in the first place.

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To encourage the uptake of DEI to complement the quotas, the Tri-Agency cooked up a rating system in 2019 to grade universities’ DEI practices. Based on a similar United Kingdom program used to encourage the uptake of women into higher education, Canada designed a program to incentivize the research environment to support women, Indigenous peoples, persons with disabilities, visible minorities and LGBT people. Participation in the program, named the Dimensions Charter, was voluntary, but universities — even those in conservative provinces — have enthusiastically signed on. As of 2022, the charter has 141 signatories.

Even though it’s a voluntary program, that doesn’t mean it’s easy to join. The University of Calgary’s application took two years to write and involved the work of 70 employees.

The highest rank a university can achieve on the four-tiered Dimensions Charter is “Transformation,” awarded when DEI is made an “integral part of all decision-making processes” and the institution “exemplifies diversity and (DEI) allyship at top leadership levels.”

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And lead they do. The University of Toronto’s engineering faculty, for example, appointed its first assistant dean of DEI in 2019: “In terms of the challenges ahead — this work is culture-change work,” said the successful candidate at the time. “And as much as it can be programmatic with milestones and measures, at the end of the day, we are shifting culture.” UBC, the next year, established a research chair for Indigenous reconciliation in its engineering department.

McMaster’s physics and astronomy department formed a DEI committee in 2020. McGill’s biology department began holding anti-racism events in 2020. Dalhousie Science named its first associate dean of equity and inclusion by 2022. At the lower levels, scientists were asked to explain their relevance to DEI in their job applications and even grant applications. Federal funders mandated that researchers explain how their projects advanced the cause of DEI. In 2022, in line with the zeitgeist, NSERC launched a strategic plan to, once again, promote DEI and “(explore) the role of science and research in the journey towards reconciliation.”

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The federal government urged these changes all along the way: federal budgets have explicitly stated that funding would be tied to diversity, while federal mandate letters have directed ministers to create more identity-focused programs.

Instead of the pure pursuit of truth, federally funded research has taken on the secondary purpose of social justice.

It may seem absurd that a hippie commune disguised as a science lab is paid to develop radically collective research methodologies. It may seem absurd that, as is the case at the University of British Columbia, biologists are angling to play language police to the subfield of evolutionary biology by rooting out “harmful terminology” in the field. It may seem odd that Canadian physicists are publishing in Nature on the urgency to DEI-ify science conferences because “Conferences are still very privileged, patriarchal places.”

But this is the exact research environment the Canadian government set out to craft: one more interested in promoting collectivism, social engineering, the meticulous measuring of the identities of scientists and the re-casting of the pursuit of truth into an exercise of skin-deep representation. It’s Ottawa that led the charge, and it will be in Ottawa where the corruption is untangled.

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As for solutions, Parliament has at least started some brainstorming. Horsman suggests potentially using a “devil’s advocate”-style model in deliberations to ensure that counter-arguments are heard out — and when it comes to DEI programs, he’s on the side of abolition. Kauffman, too, wants to see the end to diversity statements — and the return of colour-blind merit.

“Remove political criteria such as mandatory diversity statements. These are not universal consensus values. They are partisan values, and every survey will show a big partisan gap on these questions,” he told the Commons committee, back in November.

This Parliament isn’t about to order the Liberal government to roll back its near-decade of grant politicking just because some witnesses at one House committee asked. But the next one certainly should.

National Post

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