Thank you very much for that question. Identity is always a tricky issue. I'm not going to deny that.
I'll start by answering in one way, which is that the guidelines and measures that are in place in our tri-council assessments are around the fair and equitable recruitment and mentorship of trainees. You won't see EDI, as people call it, put in the other two criteria, which are the excellence of the researcher and the excellence of the actual research project. It really is how you ensure that you're not turning away people who have talent because you're in a rush and perhaps there's some sort of bias or you have a connection to some particular lab.
If you're talking more about recruitment of faculty members to try to redress some historical and current imbalances in representation, that is a different question. Some of the institutions are coming up with guidelines for how to think about identity—indigenous colleagues suggest that it involves going to the community as part of that process—but that is not the key aspect of the goal.
I just want to say that I actually despise “EDI” and “DEI” as phrases, because what they're concealing is that there's actually really good evidence that in the absence of corrective measures, people like me, especially when they're junior—not me now, because I'm a professor—are not being treated in a way that's consistent with human rights in Canada. At this particular point in our history, when the Canadian Human Rights Commission has admitted, for example, to anti-Black racism within its walls, it is not likely that we won't see those kinds of phenomena happening elsewhere in our systems.
Thanks for that question.