Science and Research Committee on Dec. 5th, 2024

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Okay.

Dr. Andrade, do you want to touch on that, or do you want to leave it?

[Prof. Maydianne Andrade]

I'm happy to touch on that.

Again, I want to acknowledge that whenever you start something new, there are challenges. I think that one of the challenges is that some people haven't dug into this in a way that allows them to understand what's being asked, and the result of that is buzzwords. There are also people who, as in any system, exploit the fact that there's suddenly this new range of things that people are supposed to be able to understand, and they don't necessarily always understand it.

When I hear, for example, that EDI training doesn't work.... I don't think training ever works, but I think most people like to learn about something new when it's relevant to their context. How that plays out depends on how good the training is. Some people go to university and don't learn very much. That doesn't mean university doesn't work. It works for some people. It doesn't work for others.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Boy, the HR department would sure be disappointed that training doesn't work, but we won't tell them that.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

I have another question here. Answer it or don't answer it. It's your choice.

We were talking about the impact of the criteria, and this is a famous one. I'm sure you've read it. It's from the University of Waterloo. It's the NSERC grant for computer science. We're talking about computer science: “Position 1, all areas of artificial intelligence. The call is open only to qualified individuals who self-identify as women, transgender, gender-fluid, non-binary, or Two-spirit.”

What do you think of that?

[Wasiimah Joomun]

I would say that when we look at research traditionally, women and diverse people were excluded at the beginning, so the issue—

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Then it's fair now to exclude everybody else. Is that what you're saying?

[Wasiimah Joomun]

That is not what I'm saying. It's just that there are some ways.... To have these types of people around the table, maybe we need to start having programs that kind of loop them in. I'm not saying that we need to exclude people. It's about having more of an equity base in having those people looped in and also just recognizing that when we look at people who are receiving the grants and funding from the government, most of them tend to be men, compared to women.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Dr. Andrade, do you want to comment on that? You don't have to. I'm just curious to know if you wanted to comment on that position.

[Prof. Maydianne Andrade]

I would like to comment, actually. I have a couple of things.

One is that, particularly in AI, actually having gender-diverse people doing AI is really important. We know there are biases built into those systems that are likely, because the viewpoints of the people creating those systems were from a very narrow part of society. In particular for that area, I can understand that.

The other thing, just to reinforce what my colleague has just said, is that there are data that suggest that people are being filtered out early. There's one particularly good study from the University of British Columbia done by a vice-dean there. What they showed was that if you look at the pool of applicants versus who gets on the short list, and versus who gets invited for an interview and gets hired from the short list, racialized people drop out of the bucket, but if they get invited, they get hired.

What they did, then, was actually—

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

You're making a good point here.

I can remember from an earlier study we did that we had a research professor talking about the professors doing the hiring. Isn't it the professors who do the hiring for these?

[Prof. Maydianne Andrade]

Yes, 100%, so the problem is they don't recognize the bias.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

A lot of people, everyday Canadians, would think, wow, these people at these universities are so enlightened and so great, but are they all a bunch of racist white men running these job selections? All our guests come here and it sounds like it's all these racist white men running these universities, and the universities don't fire them. What's going on here in our universities? Do we need to defund our universities? What's going on here?

[Prof. Maydianne Andrade]

You know what I'm going to say to that, but let me just say this. It's not an “us” and “them”, actually, believe it or not. One of the reasons I started doing this work.... For years, I experienced things as a Black woman that I didn't know were because I was a Black woman, until I married a white man, and they said, “What?” Then I realized it was related to my identity.

I went to all these sessions that talked about things that happened to racialized people, and it was all about lived experience. As a scientist, it did not convince me. What convinced me was the literature. The literature shows, experimentally, that if you think someone is a Black woman, you judge the same stuff really differently.

I have that same problem. I did an implicit association test, which tests whether you associate certain things with certain racialized groups. I have a mild to moderate tendency to associate positive things with whiteness and negative things with Blackness. I grew up in suburban Vancouver. The only Black kids I knew were my family members.

It's the media. It's not evil people twirling their mustaches in the bushes. It's not just white men. It's everyone. It's society. That's why we need to put up acknowledgements that this stuff exists, that it happens and that we can have processes that make sure it doesn't influence our decision-making.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

I appreciate your honest answers.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Thank you very much. It was excellent to hear that.

Now we're going to turn to MP Kelloway for five minutes, please.

[Mike Kelloway, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

Thank you so much, Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for being here.

Dr. Andrade, let me echo the chorus of congratulations on your award.

Have both of you been watching the testimony recently? Okay, so you get a sense of some of the diverse opinions that have been brought to the table in terms of what is seemingly, unfortunately, becoming a right-wing or a left-wing thing.

I want to go back to the social sciences. I have a background in the.... I'm not a researcher, but I worked at a university and worked at a community college. I totally believe that we need to invest more in applied research in relation to industry. I wonder if we can touch a little, right now, on the social sciences. We heard some folks, through their testimony, and some members of this committee really question the importance of the social sciences. I want to hear from both of you in terms of why the social sciences are important.

For example, if we look at a list of studies.... My colleagues across the way have done so. They've brought up unpaid work in Bogotá or something in relation to Dolly Parton and how that relates to Canada if it's funded by the federal government. I'm wondering if you can unpack, though, in all seriousness, the importance of the social sciences. In particular, it was mentioned that 81% of people with a Ph.D. go into the workforce outside of the university.

Dr. Andrade, I'll go to you first, and then we'll go to Ms. Joomun.

[Prof. Maydianne Andrade]

Sure. I may be one of the rare natural scientists who.... I've been reading the social science literature since 2013, when I first started recognizing some of these things were happening.

The social sciences are essential to everything we do. Interdisciplinary research is where things move. Scientists can build things or create things. Is the public going to use them? We don't know, unless we have social scientists working on our team. How do we convince people in under-represented communities that we need their genes for a genomics database that allows personalized medicine? We need social scientists to ask what the history is of what's gone on in that community and how we can get them to trust us in a genuine sort of a way.

I think social science is critically important to all the big problems that we're trying to solve right now. We do have to work across fields. Interdisciplinary research is essential. I agree with my colleagues who spoke earlier about that.

[Mike Kelloway, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

Thank you very much.

Ms. Joomun.

[Wasiimah Joomun]

I would echo what Dr. Andrade mentioned. When we look at the multidisciplinary and the interdisciplinary side of it, you need everyone around the table. You need not only the scientist who is making the thing in the lab, but also the people who are able to sell it to Canadians.

Again, when we look at doctoral graduates and how much they make, regardless of discipline, they make, on average, $95,000. Therefore, they are contributing, and they end up working in the workforce, similar to their peers who are not in the social sciences. It's looking at, again, the holistic approach and the interdisciplinary part. It takes more than one person when it comes to research. It's not just the people in the lab, but also the people outside the lab who connect with the community as well.

[Mike Kelloway, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

Thank you, both of you.

The testimony we've heard the last couple of days, again, has been diverse. Some of it I disagree with, but I think that, in some ways, to a certain degree, it's important to have all of those voices heard. It got me thinking, the past couple of nights, about when I graduated from the University of Calgary with my master's and did a final thesis. The instructors and the professors at the University of Calgary certainly had a particular political viewpoint. I was one of probably 30 students in the program. I was the only Atlantic Canadian. However, they never, ever let that reflect in the research I was doing with them in terms of my research paper. I think there's something to be learned from that, hopefully.

I'm sorry. Some people are over there talking, so maybe they would like to have their sidebar somewhere else.

One of the comments lately—a couple of days ago, I think—was from an individual who was basically devaluing aboriginal research as compared to western science. I'm wondering whether, in the last couple of seconds, you can speak to, perhaps, your opinion on that.

We'll start with Dr. Andrade and then go to Ms. Joomun. We only have a few moments left.

[Prof. Maydianne Andrade]

I'll admit that I have a lot to learn there. There are deep histories of peoples who are connected to the land. I'm an ecology and evolution biologist. The type of oral history that's been passed down about changes in ecology and about organisms, for example, like bears or eagles, looking at how many eggs they have to tell what sort of year it's going to be.... These are valuable data. Understanding that kind of connection to land is important. I, myself, haven't gone there yet, but I'm looking forward to learning more about it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Valerie Bradford]

Thank you. That's your time.

Now we'll turn the floor over to MP Blanchette-Joncas for two and a half minutes, please.

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

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Ms. Joomun, in our last study on the distribution of federal government funding among Canada's post-secondary institutions, which was tabled in the House today, and which I invite all of you to read, we found that the funding of francophone institutions has been inadequate, relative to the weight of their teaching staff, for the past 20 years.

In the claims you make, you emphasize how important it is to remove economic obstacles to access to higher education, more particularly in order to support research.

How could francophone students and researchers, particularly those from less favoured regions, benefit from a review of funding criteria, criteria that currently tend to favour large urban anglophone universities?

[Wasiimah Joomun]

I do agree with you in terms of the lack of funding for French or francophone institutions. That's why we have the partnership with l'Union étudiante du Québec. Most of our francophone institutions tend to be centred around Quebec, although there are multiple across the country as well. I know that our partners are currently running their campaign in terms of seeing how the provincial government can also match that and support that, because currently we are playing catch-up on investment that hasn't happened for the last 20 years.

It's about how we can provincially, as well, support that, and it's also about federally having criteria that will ensure that francophone students who are qualified and who have the merit to get that federal funding are able to access that.