Thank you, Chair.
I wish to raise concern over several aspects of research funding in Canada that fall under the rubric of diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, sometimes known as EDI.
The main point I wish to make is that DEI, as practised by the tri-council research councils, reflects a particular world view. It's a left-wing world view that I term “cultural socialism”. That's a valid world view, but it's a particular world view.
Cultural socialism, as I define it, consists of two tenets. The first is DE, or diversity and equity. This means that rather than, say, equalizing outcomes by class—as in traditional Marxist socialism—outcomes should, instead, be equalized by race and sex, through a form of discrimination. The second component of cultural socialism is inclusion, or I. It is that minority groups must be protected from emotional harm, or what's known as “emotional safety” or “protection from emotional trauma”. It means that this requires a censoring of free speech and the pursuit of truth because this might offend. This aspect of DEI is what underpins what is commonly known as “cancel culture”.
My point here is that DEI is political; it's not neutral. Just to prove that, when I asked a representative sample, in a Maru survey of 1,500 Canadians in September 2023, whether they approve of flying the pride flag on government buildings, those who identified as “left of centre” approved 63-24, while those who identified as “right of centre” disapproved 74-15. Moderates also disapproved by a more modest 42-35. The point here is that [Technical difficulty-Editor].