Evidence of meeting #115 for Science and Research in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was good.
A recording is available from Parliament.
John Dewey Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, As an Individual
That's exactly right. Funders have to be patient. Good things can happen, but there is a danger in thinking that “We've invested this, and we want our return.” Sometimes it takes a lot of time, and that's why basic research often suffers: People are impatient.
Liberal
Lloyd Longfield Liberal Guelph, ON
Thank you.
The chair is just about to interrupt us, so I'll just interrupt you before she does that and say thank you so much for your time.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Valerie Bradford
Thank you both for the interesting conversation.
Now we will turn to MP Blanchette-Joncas for two and a half minutes, please.
Bloc
Maxime Blanchette-Joncas Bloc Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Professor Kitcher, you stressed the importance of intellectual diversity in academia.
Given that EDI policies exclude certain promising researchers who don't fit these criteria, do you think such policies could push researchers to leave Canada for countries that don't have them?
John Dewey Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, As an Individual
Obviously, what happened has been happening. One of the witnesses who is not here today but was here last time clearly felt that she wanted out of the whole system because of this. I feel that's terribly sad.
What I would like to see happen, when that starts to irritate people and make them feel unwanted and unappreciated, is some mechanism through which they can try to correct the ways in which what bothers them is being handled.
We might have had a much better outcome from the DEI policies that have existed if we had been aware at a much earlier stage of the dangers of going overboard. If there had been more conversation and more serious exchange at earlier stages, we might have avoided some of the overshoots that seem to have happened and that are now causing so much trouble.
Bloc
Maxime Blanchette-Joncas Bloc Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC
Thank you.
I'd like to hear Mr. Robson answer the same question.
Executive Director, Climate Discussion Nexus, As an Individual
I worked at the same think tank that Heather Exner-Pirot worked at because I was essentially pushed out of academia for having the wrong demographics. I mean, you're looking at it here. It's a serious problem to say you're not aware of this. Surveys of the political leanings of the faculty show that they're overwhelmingly to the left. It's absurd. To say, “Had we been warned...”, well, of course you were warned. You were warned vocally about this for decades, and people just said, “Oh, yeah; you're a bunch of bigots.”
If I may, I'll quickly tell a story.
My parents got their Ph.D.s in the late fifties. They were on the road for a couple of years at UBC and U of A, and then my dad landed a job at the University of Toronto—a plum job. My mom said, “If you can do it, I can do it.” When an opening came up in history, she got an interview, and at the end of it the chairman said to her, “Well, that was a good interview, dear, but in this department, we don't hire women.” My mother fixed him with a gimlet eye and said, “You're hiring this one,” and they did, so there's your DEI.
Bloc
Maxime Blanchette-Joncas Bloc Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC
Mr. Robson, as you know, the United States is starting to phrase out EDI criteria.
Do you think this could worsen the brain drain of promising Canadian researchers moving to the U.S.?
Executive Director, Climate Discussion Nexus, As an Individual
I think there is a big risk of that. The Americans went a long way into this. Again, it's not the Americans; it's one university after another. They have thousands, very decentralized and many of them private.
I think it won't just be the people who are excluded; it will be the people who want to be hired not on the basis of their identity but on the basis of their research and their quality as teachers.
It's just unfair to treat people according to group characteristics. We finally learned that fact, after many years of a system that was very unfair to people who were not of the demographic majority or were not men, and then we decided to do it again. Why?
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Valerie Bradford
That's our time, Mr. Robson.
I'm now going to turn it over to Mr. Cannings, please, for two and a half minutes.
NDP
Richard Cannings NDP South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC
Thank you.
I'm going to go back to Professor Kitcher and give him an opportunity to react to something that Dr. Robson said.
One of his themes is that there are a whole lot of things about government bureaucracy that aren't working well. We need to hire more bureaucrats to bolster areas where things aren't going well and we should just unload federal science and federal research, and that would pay for it. He mentioned that the federal government spent $15 billion in post-secondary education, which he claims is a completely provincial responsibility, which I would disagree with.
Don't you think this is a false dichotomy? I mean, shouldn't we be trying to help the people in all the ways we need to, and one of the ways is to have a good science research program? In this age, science is the real path to innovation and wealth in a country. Canada is way behind all the other developed countries in research investment.
Can you just comment on that aspect, which is the ability of science to really bring good things to the economy of a country?
John Dewey Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, As an Individual
Of course, I agree completely with what you've just said.
I think that it should be the case that the needs that Dr. Robson talked about, the needs of people in your infrastructure.... He talked about lots of things, and I'm in no position to know the facts about that, but assuming that he's right about that, those are also important, so what do you do?
If you increase the budget, it would be a good idea to distribute it across all of these needs. If you can't do that, you're dealing with another tragedy of the commons situation. Mr. Longfield already pointed that out. Under those circumstances, you can either do the awful competitive game in which people sort into tribes and fight one another for limited resources or you can try to have a rational discussion that works things out.
You are completely right: You cannot neglect science. The scientific community, over the course of the 20th century and into this century, has shown how innovation and research—federally funded or publicly funded—can produce a transformation in various societies.
The argument that Vannevar Bush gave just after the Second World War for the establishment of the National Science Foundation in the United States still applies. You have to keep your seed corn. You have to go on doing this research that will only pay off in future years. It's incredibly important, and I think for Canada to turn its back on that would be an utter disaster.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Valerie Bradford
Thank you to both of our witnesses for coming back. I really appreciate it.
If there's anything that you didn't get a chance to cover, you may submit it in writing to the clerk.
Executive Director, Climate Discussion Nexus, As an Individual
Thank you for inviting us.
Liberal
Lloyd Longfield Liberal Guelph, ON
Chair, I have a point of order.
I'm thinking of our next meeting. The tri-councils weren't able to finish. We finished one half of the previous meeting. Are we going to continue with this study?
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Valerie Bradford
I believe that the clerk has reached out to them again to see. They weren't available today, so I'm going to say—
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Valerie Bradford
My gift to the committee was going to be that today was our last meeting. I wasn't planning on calling a meeting Tuesday. We will resume in January. I know MP Tocher is very disappointed. You're free to meet with yourself.
Yes, go ahead.
Conservative
Corey Tochor Conservative Saskatoon—University, SK
On that comment, Chair, this study is, I think, exceeding everyone's expectation, and I would hope that into the new year, we may want to consider extending it, especially because of the interruptions in some of the testimony that we're getting, to make sure that we have the best possible report. Hopefully just flag that idea that this study is going as well as it has been. I think an extension of four or five meetings is warranted into the future in the new year as something for us to consider.
Liberal
Lloyd Longfield Liberal Guelph, ON
We can have a debate on how many meetings. I was thinking that we might have one or two more meetings, and we could talk to Mr. Blanchette-Joncas as well—