Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to members of the committee. It's a pleasure to appear before you today.

Every year, the federal Government of Canada spends billions of dollars on research funding. Canadians expect, and rightly so, that this money will be allocated to the most deserving researchers based on excellence—and excellence alone—in order for them to pursue high-quality research that will benefit Canadians.

Sadly, this is no longer the case. Today, federal research funding is often allocated on the basis of race, sex, ideological conformity and other criteria that have nothing to do with the pursuit of truth and excellence.

For example, we have federally funded Canada research chairs that are available only to people of a certain race or of a certain sex or a combination of both, even though none of these characteristics have anything to do with the quality of someone's research. Indeed, under plans announced by the Government of Canada, universities will lose their funding under the Canada research chairs program unless they meet diversity requirements in recruitment, which means that people are no longer being hired solely because of their research.

We also have federally funded research programs that expect applicants to “clearly demonstrate their strong commitment to EDI in their applications”—EDI being, of course, equity, diversity and inclusion—as well as to integrate EDI into their “research practice and design”. With respect, the purpose of research design is to enable good research to be done. It is not to promote specific ideological objectives such as EDI.

In addition, there are many informal obstacles to the pursuit of excellence within the federal funding system for research. For example, in the humanities and social sciences, where I come from, it is well known that research proposals that contain buzzwords and fashionable progressive political language have a much better chance of being successful than do proposals on more traditional subjects, which use more traditional approaches and which do not contain buzzwords. This means that, from the beginning of their careers, young scholars and researchers are being taught that the way to get ahead in academia is to be a conformist and to chase grant money using buzzwords, regardless of what they actually think is intellectually valuable.

Now, I speak to this committee as a former recipient of federal research funding through SSHRC. Without this funding, I would not have been able to pursue my academic career, which has taken me to different countries, and for this I am very grateful.

Naturally, I am a strong believer in the value of investing public money into research. However, in these difficult economic times, many Canadians already question the value of funding academic research, which can seem sometimes irrelevant to their daily lives, and the heavy-handed imposition of EDI and other ideological requirements in research funding undermines public support for public research funding. That is something that needs to be urgently addressed.

Thank you very much.

Transcript

Discussions (0)