Science and Research Committee on Dec. 5th, 2024

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

I call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 113 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Science and Research.

Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format. All witnesses have completed the required connection tests in advance of the meeting.

I'd like to remind all members of the following points. Please wait until I recognize you by name before speaking. All comments should be addressed through the chair. Members, please raise your hand if you wish to speak, whether participating in person or via Zoom. The clerk and I will manage the speaking order as best we can. For those participating by video conference, click on the microphone icon to activate your microphone, and please mute yourself when you are not speaking. For interpretation for those on Zoom, you have the choice, at the bottom of your screen, of floor, English or French. Thanks to all of you for your co-operation.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(3)(i) and the motion adopted by the committee on Thursday, October 31, 2024, the committee resumes its study of the impact of the criteria for awarding federal funding on research excellence in Canada.

We have with us, as an individual, Dr. Geoff Horsman, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry, Wilfrid Laurier University. From École de technologie supérieure, ETS, by video conference, we have Christian Casanova, vice-president of research and partnerships, and with the same organization, Ghyslain Gagnon, dean of research. From the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, we have Karine Morin, president and chief executive officer.

Up to five minutes will be given for opening remarks, after which we'll proceed with our rounds of questions.

Dr. Horsman, I invite you to make an opening statement of up to five minutes, please.

[Dr. Geoff Horsman, Associate Professor Chemistry and Biochemistry, Wilfrid Laurier University, As an Individual]

Madam Chair and committee members, thank you for inviting me.

The academy has become an echo chamber of progressive social justice ideas, and this is reflected in the federal research granting process. A previous witness noted a phenomenon described as group polarization. When ideologically uniform groups lack dissenting voices, the group often arrives at positions far more radical than those of most individuals in the group. Lack of viewpoint diversity diminishes research excellence.

For example, the Journal of Chemical Education published a paper titled “A Special Topic Class in Chemistry on Feminism and Science as a Tool to Disrupt the Dysconscious Racism in STEM”. This paper described “the development and interrelationship between quantum mechanics, Marxist materialism, Afro-futurism/pessimism, and post-colonial nationalism” and attempted to “problematize time as a linear social construct”.

Our government funded a research grant titled “Decolonizing Light: Tracing and countering colonialism in contemporary physics”, where the authors don't aim to find new or better explanations of light or to seek scientific truth, but rather plan to address the marginalization of women, Black people and indigenous peoples for social equity.

The journal Cogent Social Sciences published a paper titled “The conceptual penis as a social construct”, in which the authors used post-structuralist discursive criticism and the example of climate change to “argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a social construct isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity.”

Another paper, in the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, titled “Loving the Brine Shrimp: Exploring Queer Feminist Blue Posthumanities to Reimagine the 'America's Dead Sea'”, described “hydrosexuality” as a “more-than-human sensuality and sexuality emphasizing fluidity and relationality” that “offers a cultural understanding of water as a non-binary substance”, and it suggested embracing “watery thinking”.

As it happens, one of these papers turned out to be a hoax and was later retracted by the journal. If you are not familiar with this story—and I am afraid that most people are not—you will doubtless have trouble discerning which one was the hoax, which tells us that a great deal of scholarship has been ideologically corrupted to the point of being, quite literally, beyond parody.

So, the question is this: Do the criteria used to award research funding contribute to this polarization? I believe that they do.

Many will assure us that we can trust committee chairs and rubrics like merit indicators to protect against radical ideology and politicization. I disagree because, in addition to ideological uniformity among academics, some of the merit indicators themselves are highly progressive. Chief among them are those involving equity, diversity and inclusion, or EDI.

Now, here I want to clarify what EDI means, its real-world consequences. These include barring people from faculty employment based on ethnicity or sex. When confronted with this reality of racial discrimination, EDI advocates often retreat to more defensible positions like research design, such as, for example, ensuring that seat belts are manufactured to account for the smaller frames of women or ensuring that both male and female mice are used in experiments.

However, examples like this have nothing to do with EDI as it is practised. These examples simply highlight poor experimental design. Sloppy science is not improved by disenfranchising white men. It's improved by inculcating a culture of high standards and open debate. EDI fails on both counts. It lowers standards by disqualifying applicants by race or sex. Moreover, many people with integrity will not go along with this and will self-select out of federally funded academic research.

With respect to open debate, I can personally attest to many examples of soft censorship. For example, tenured professors have told me that they are too scared to attend academic discussions challenging new ideas or directives involving EDI or indigenization.

I hope you agree that ideological conformity, restricted applicant pools and loss of open debate are all at odds with a thriving research culture. I urge you to remove EDI from all aspects of federal research funding.

Thank you for your time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Thank you for that opening statement.

We will now turn to Mr. Casanova and Mr. Gagnon.

I invite you to make an opening statement of up to five minutes between you.

[Christian Casanova, Vice President of Research and Partnerships, École de technologie supérieure]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Ladies and gentlemen members of the committee, good afternoon.

It is an honour for the École de technologie supérieure, or ETS, to take part in this exercise alongside other Canadian research leaders. Thank you for inviting us to participate.

My name is Christian Casanova, and I am vice president of research and partnerships at ETS. I am joined by Ghyslain Gagnon, dean of research. As both of us are researchers, we are particularly concerned about research funding criteria.

The mission of ETS, which ranks second among engineering faculties in Canada, is to further technological and economic development across the country through applied research activities that contribute directly to technological innovation. We are certain that practical solutions to the great upheavals of our society are generated by research and innovation.

As you obviously know, federal granting agencies, in recent years, have begun to lean toward adjusting evaluation criteria within their communities. In 2019, five of those organizations signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, or DORA, which represents a major change that now makes it possible to give preference to the qualitative aspects of projects.

The research that is done at ETS focuses mainly on engineering, and the vast majority of our federal funding comes from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, or NSERC. We believe that organization has adopted changes in a rigorous and adequate manner. Although we are satisfied that present evaluation criteria will yield results over the long term, we have uncovered four promising ways in which to exploit the potential of the entire research community in Canada and to generate even greater impacts for Canadians.

First of all, the data are very clear: French-speaking researchers who work in a minority community in Canada face major barriers that prevent them from working as productively as they otherwise could in their official language of choice.

Since linguistic duality is central to our Canadian identity, the universities and federal granting agencies have an important role to play. Given this disadvantage, it is vital that we promote equity for French-language research by setting percentage targets for grant applications submitted in French and for their success rate. Meeting those targets would help better represent the 22% of the population of Canada who speak French, a currently underexploited potential source of knowledge.

Second, we recommend that funding applications continue to be reviewed based on DORA principles and criteria. At the same time, we advise that those principles be promoted in our scientific community, particularly in the context of awareness campaigns designed to emphasize that DORA makes it possible to assess the intrinsic quality of research in a number of forms. Furthermore, as the evaluation of DORA principles and criteria must be applied more broadly, we encourage the granting agencies to provide incentives to stimulate the scientific community's active participation in the review process.

It is important to allow a period of time in which to adapt to these changes and fully and objectively measure their impact on the real and complex issues in our society. Any turning back, which would reintroduce quantitative parameters that have previously proven to be unreliable would be counterproductive.

Third, ETS is persuaded that the complex challenges of our society require interdisciplinary and intersectoral research teams. Consequently, as it has been proven that excellence and impacts are harder to demonstrate in an interdisciplinary research setting, we hope that the evaluation criteria are adapted in such a way as to encourage this type of research. If budgets are established in existing programs and new programs are created for interdisciplinary research, more researchers will join forces to address our country's priority issues.

Lastly, ETS would like to highlight the ecosystem's efforts to create research environments that promote equity, diversity and inclusion, or EDI. However, we recommend that EDI criteria focus on elements specific to research projects and that they be limited to the value of the proposal where applicable. In real terms, we suggest that EDI criteria be withdrawn from recruitment and integration plans and be replaced by institutional guidelines with which projects will have to comply, including continuous evaluation and improvement measures.

That would simplify the process and guarantee real impact.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

That's a little over our time.

Thank you, sir. We'll get to the rest of that with our questions, I'm sure.

For the final opening statement, I'll turn to Ms. Morin.

You have up to five minutes for your opening statement, please.

[Karine Morin, President and Chief Executive Officer, Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences]

Good afternoon, committee members.

My name is Karine Morin, and I am chief executive officer of the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

I would like to thank the committee for this opportunity to discuss the impact of the criteria for awarding federal funding on research excellence in Canada.

The Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences is the national voice for our disciplines, dedicated to the advancement of an inclusive, democratic and prosperous society. Our membership includes 76 post-secondary institutions and 80 scholarly associations, representing a broad community of more than 90,000 researchers and graduate students across Canada.

Our membership recognizes that research excellence across all disciplines has long been a hallmark of Canada's research system, and it remains strongly committed to this goal.

I would like to present three main ideas.

First, it is important to note that the funding agencies offer a variety of funding options that are designed to produce different results and that establish different evaluation criteria.

Second, we are witnessing a global evolution in the way research is evaluated, and the federation fully supports the idea that Canada is committed to this direction.

Third, regardless of the range of funding options, peer review is still essential in determining excellence in research. In other words, review must be conducted by members of the research community who have the necessary qualifications to determine research quality.

Let me address each of these three points in some more detail.

Funding agencies establish different funding opportunities to achieve different goals. For the humanities and social sciences, the insight grants administered by SSHRC are a flagship program. It focuses on building knowledge and understanding about people, societies and the world. The evaluation considers three overarching aspects of an application: the aim and importance of the endeavour, the feasibility of the research plan and the expertise of the researcher or research team.

In contrast, the new frontiers in research fund is one that supports high-risk, high-reward interdisciplinary research. As you might imagine, the evaluation criteria will differ to focus on each of those elements.

Overall, to leverage Canada’s full research capacity, we need flexible criteria to measure excellence. We must be cautious of a one-size-fits-all approach. For example, citation patterns and publication formats differ in the humanities and social sciences and are markedly different from the STEM fields, making traditional bibliometrics-based assessment tools much less relevant and less effective in our disciplines.

In fact, there has been an evolution in expanding the criteria by which research is evaluated beyond such bibliometric indicators. In this regard, I wish to emphasize the agency's continued engagement in international initiatives such as the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, as well as the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment. These initiatives have helped recognize that how we determine research excellence must reflect and adapt to new disciplinary approaches and new research-related activities that are undertaken to generate knowledge and disseminate it to achieve greater impact.

Finally, peer review remains critical, irrespective of the funding opportunity. This entails having relevant experts to assess the quality of the research proposal. In all instances, peer review aims for the assessment of a grant application to be fair and unbiased. It also aims to ensure that there are no conflicts of interest and that confidentiality is maintained.

In closing, I wish to reiterate that research excellence requires inclusive frameworks in which an array of disciplines, research methods and researcher perspectives all contribute to the production of new knowledge and its dissemination. To strengthen research excellence in Canada, our system must support and reflect the full diversity and capacity of Canada’s research talent.

We look forward to ongoing conversations on this priority.

Thank you for your attention.

I will be pleased to answer questions from committee members.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Thank you for your opening remarks.

I'm now going to open the floor to members for questions. Please be sure to indicate to whom your questions are directed.

We'll start our first round of questions with MP Tochor for six minutes, please.

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to our witnesses.

Mr. Horsman, we've been talking about group conformity and how that might diminish the quality of research. I get that EDI may contribute to reinforcing that conformity, but if we abolish EDI from the award criteria, do you think that would solve the problem?

[Dr. Geoff Horsman]

I don't think it would solve the problem. I don't think removing that criterion would all of a sudden open up a lot of topics for exploration. It may, around the margins, improve things a little bit. You might, for example, see slightly more improved environments for research without some of these EDI bureaucracies, I guess. I think the problem is that you don't have a diversity of different opinions and viewpoints present in the university and in the broader research ecosystem, so I don't think it's really the end-all.

One thing I think we should consider is this endless expansion of more and more grants and types of oversight bodies and more funding bodies. I think we have to ask if government-funded research will always lead to improved economic growth. I don't think there are convincing arguments. I think mostly private sector research drives economic growth. I'm not saying we should have no public funding, but I think we need to have a conversation about what the appropriate amount is. I think removing EDI certainly is one first step.

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

Some are arguing that government should fund exploratory research, which might mean that a few strange ideas come out. We've highlighted at the committee that there are some crazy things that taxpayers have funded, unfortunately, to be studied. What's the harm in that? Don't we want lots of diversity and to be part of a vibrant research culture in an open society?

[Dr. Geoff Horsman]

Yes, we do, certainly. I think there's nothing wrong with having a lot of different ideas. I think it's important that we are open to all sorts of different ideas. There are a couple of problems, however. There are essentially two different world views at play in the university now. I think what we have to recognize is that many of these ideas, as in some of the examples I've shown, are part of a strain of thought called “critical social justice”. I think they're not playing by the liberal science rules we're accustomed to.

In our liberal society, we tend to have a liberal economic system, with a right of free markets, and a democratic system. The writer Jonathan Rauch coined the term “liberal science”. Liberal science is any knowledge production system, via a scientist or a journalist, to generate robust knowledge. There are really only two rules. The first rule is that knowledge is provisional. No one has the final say. Anything could be questioned. If you look at, for example, the history of estimates on the size of the universe, it changes constantly. That's because no one said, “We're done. It's over.” What you notice now is that it's becoming more fashionable in the academy to say, “This is beyond debate. The science is settled.” It's becoming fashionable to actually break Rauch's first rule.

The second rule is that no one has personal authority. No individual or group gets to decide, “I know the truth. It's just me.” You need to have it open to anyone. I tell my students, for example, that if they do an experiment well and describe it properly, it should be replicable by someone on another continent in another culture centuries into the future. It's universal. That rule is being broken through assertions of a certain ethnic knowledge or ways of knowing or lived experience.

I think these are problems that are ascendant in the academy. They have to be recognized, and I believe they have to be confronted head-on.

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

Besides EDI, are there any other award criteria that you think might have a negative impact on research excellence?

[Dr. Geoff Horsman]

I'm sorry. Could you repeat that?

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

Besides EDI, are there any other ways in which they kind of put the thumb on the scale that you think might have a negative impact on research excellence?

[Dr. Geoff Horsman]

I think there are a few issues. For the discovery grant, for example, which is one I'm familiar with, if you look at some of the merit indicators for the proposal, they include things like socio-economic and environmental impacts. That's open to interpretation. You can imagine that if you are a progressive, you might say a proposal that seeks to reduce emissions will have beneficial impacts, whereas someone else, perhaps a more Conservative person, might say that something is better if it expands oil and gas production and leads to economic growth.

There's no agreed-upon definition of what that is. It's really open to a value judgment. Again, because many academics tend to be much more progressive, you tend to prioritize certain types of research over others.

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

Thank you again for the work you do at the universities.

We're out of time, but I encourage you to write any additional briefs on different questions we've asked today. It will be helpful in writing the report that will be coming here shortly.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Thank you.

Now we'll turn to MP Longfield for six minutes, please.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses.

I want to start my questioning with Dr. Morin.

In your testimony, it sounded to me a lot like you were pulling pieces out of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, and then you mentioned it. What's the state of play in the academic community in terms of using some of these ideas from, I guess, 10 or 12 years ago now? Are they being embraced by the academic community?

[Karine Morin]

I think it's been about a decade. Because it is a significant evolution, it's been embraced by the community incrementally and growingly, I would say, and perhaps with some leadership from the funding agencies.

Indeed, over the past decade, the funding agencies have been looking to recognize that bibliometric indicators, which were much relied on in certain fields, are not necessarily a definitive assessment of the quality of the work. It certainly can be seen as having been published in a prestigious journal, but to therefore conclude on its high quality can sometimes be a bit of an erroneous shortcut. By moving away from those types of metrics, what we're trying to say is that it's not just the quantitative aspects of the research or its impact that we want to measure, but the qualitative aspects.

One way this will come to the fore even more is that the funding agencies have indicated that they would move away from the type of CV template that researchers submit along with applications, in which they describe and list, at length, publications, for instance. The narrative CV, as it's sometimes referred to, allows a researcher to select what they wish to highlight and describe in more qualitative terms what the impact has been, what motivated the research, what results were achieved and how it can be of benefit.

Moving from a quantification of the productivity of a researcher as an indicator of the excellence of a researcher to a more qualitative consideration is definitely an evolution. I will wait and see how the research community reacts to that change, but it is something that has been talked about for a bit of time. It has been used by the NIH in the U.S., as well as by the UKRI in the U.K. Some will be looking forward to it and some might be a bit surprised by it.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

I guess the typical power structure is being changed, and the people at the top of that structure aren't going to like the change. People who might benefit from having more exposure, from smaller universities or early-stage research, and equity, diversity and inclusion, when it comes to double-blind reviews so that we don't know anything, really, about the researcher other than what's on the paper in front of you....

I see you nodding. Could you comment?

I've been shocked, in this study so far, to hear about equity, diversity and inclusion being something bad, when almost all universities that I know—for sure, Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Guelph—have equity, diversity and inclusion as one of their core principles for education. How that wouldn't go into research has been a bit of a surprise—well, a lot of a surprise—to me.

Do you have any comments on that?

[Karine Morin]

I'll speak to two elements here that speak to identifying a researcher or to a double-blind review when the researcher's identity isn't made immediately available to the reviewers.

Here, I refer first to CIHR, which was studied by Whitman some years ago. He looked at the two main streams at CIHR: one where there was primarily emphasis on the project and one where there was also considerable emphasis on the expertise and background of the researcher. It was when the researcher was being assessed that they saw greater discrepancy in terms of success rates of women. Somehow that was being factored in in a way that was disadvantageous to women.

I refer to the new frontiers in research fund, which does use that double-blind mechanism, and there we saw that success rates were very much in conformity with application rates and, in some instances, even a little higher.

Despite best attempts to focus on the scientific merit of the project, the research plan, the methodologies, etc., when we evaluate the researcher, it does seem that some unconscious bias can filter in and ultimately affect how an application gets evaluated.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Right, and I think that in terms of the scientific principles, you have to identify biases and you have to do your best to check biases. Part of the peer review process is to have other sets of eyes to try to eliminate biases, which is also the goal of equity, diversity and inclusion.

I don't see this as a political thing. I think this is a scientific approach that should be embraced. Would you agree with that?

[Karine Morin]

Indeed I would.

I would think that, just as we've identified that there can be risks of certain types of conflicts of interest and we've put in safeguards to make sure that those are presented and put forward.... Sometimes, that may mean that the reviewer will excuse himself or herself. It's the same with being aware of other types of biases. They may not come from conflict of interest, in terms of economic or financial considerations, but other types of considerations can also factor in and—

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

That's our time. Maybe you can elaborate on that with another questioner.

We're now going to turn to MP Blanchette-Joncas for six minutes.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Welcome to the witnesses who are here today to take part in this important study.

Mr. Horsman, I read your material, and it contains the term "inclusive excellence".

Do you think it's possible to combine excellence and inclusion, particularly based on equity, diversity and inclusion criteria?

I'd like to hear your opinion on that subject.