Why would we want to try to...? I want to be really clear here. As I said, our objective is not to implement an affirmative action program; our objective is to achieve excellence, on behalf of Canadians, in terms of our research pursuits. I think the purely rhetorical question that comes up, in terms of this line of inquiry, is a very simple one: How do you compete internationally if you leave half of your team on the sidelines? That is, effectively, what has historically happened in terms of things like the CRC program.
I think there has been an example or two in the past of what looks like an affirmative action hiring program. This is something I think is difficult to support, and I do not personally support it. However, there was a Federal Court case that was applied and resolved to the way that program was being administered, because it was so systematically biased against everybody except people who look like me.
As I said in my remarks—and I mean this to the absolute depths of sincerity—when I am looking for people to include in my research group, the last thing I'm trying to do is make everybody be like me. I want them to disagree with me. I want to have arguments with them about our science and the nature of evidence. Those robust conversations make discovery more powerful and make us evaluate those ideas from more than one perspective. If they're all like me, our views on that issue become more limited, and our capacity to compete internationally downstream, a few steps from that point, is then degraded, and that's antithetical to the objectives of all of what we do.