Thank you for the opportunity to speak before this committee.

My name is Azim Shariff, and I'm a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia. I was born and educated in Canada—first at the University of Toronto and then, for my doctorate, at UBC—and I later held faculty positions in the U.S. before being invited back home under the Canada 150 research chairs program. In light of this committee's study, my most useful contribution today will be to share my observations about how well-intentioned policies surrounding the Canada research chair program have played out in practice.

As you all know, the CRC program serves as one of Canada's primary tools for attracting and retaining highly impactful researchers. To fulfill its mandate to support research excellence, the program has, over its 25-year tenure, adjusted its policies with regard to equity, diversity and inclusion. There are many rationales for why academia should prioritize these values: A faculty that is more representative of the Canadian population earns trust and legitimacy with the community; it is also more tuned to the full spectrum of questions that Canadians care about. Chief among the reasons, from a public interest standpoint, is that removing barriers to access means that nothing prevents the most talented scholars from transmuting their talent into the products of research that benefit us all.

To achieve this goal, the CRC program set 2029 equity targets for groups that were severely under-represented at the program's outset: women and gender equity-seeking groups; racialized individuals, like me; persons with disabilities; and indigenous peoples. The targets have been, largely, reached nationally for all groups.

That said, not all targets for all groups have been reached at all institutions. As per the 2019 policy adjustment, so long as an institution trails behind its targets on any one group, it is restricted from submitting new chair holder nominations for individuals outside of any of these groups.

There are two concerns with this policy in terms of how it operates on the ground.

First, aggregating the equity groups in this way serves as a blunt and sometimes ineffective way of addressing barriers. The pool of scholars who are racialized individuals or are from women and gender equity-seeking groups is much larger and is therefore much easier to hire from than the pool of indigenous peoples or persons with disabilities. As a consequence, the policy incentivizes some institutions—like mine—to swell their ranks of women and racialized individuals well beyond their targets while continuing to trail the targets for the latter two groups.

The second concern is the impact on the public interest of the restriction in the first place. As I noted earlier, any barrier to equal access impoverishes everyone because it fails to position the most talented individuals into the roles where their talent can do the most good, yet with the restrictive policy, the CRC program employs exactly this kind of barrier—closing doors rather than opening them.

Here is a case study of how this plays out. Several years ago, my department sought to fill a tier one CRC vacancy. We were replacing the retiring director of a highly productive global excellence research cluster on language sciences. Since this needed to be a senior scholar with a particular expertise, the pool of candidates was already small. Since it was a CRC hire, the pool was further narrowed to members of the four equity-seeking groups, excluding many of the most relevant and impactful scholars. This left very few qualified candidates, and indeed only one was both above our thresholds and open to moving from her institution in the U.S. Unable to meet her requirements and without any backup options, the search failed, the CRC was revoked, and the future of the institute and the research cluster is now in jeopardy.

Equity and social justice are important goals of the CRC program. However, by explicitly excluding a body of scholars, this restrictive policy creates an unnecessary conflict. It sets those aims against the program's broader goal of improving our depth of knowledge and quality of life for all Canadians, leaving talent on the table.

This is especially pressing right now. We're currently seeing the academic environment in the United States undermined by attacks on academic freedom and by devastating cuts to research funding. America is the global centre of science and research. The whole world will lose out from the disruption to knowledge creation that they will now experience. Canada is best positioned to pick up that slack. For high-impact scholars choosing to leave the U.S., the most attractive alternatives are to come to the University of Toronto, Waterloo or UBC.

The world needs these people to remain productive. I would encourage Canada to reconsider the trade-offs involved in keeping one hand of its CRC program tied behind its back. We should refine our policies accordingly. Science and scholarship work best when everyone is invited to participate.

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