Thank you. That's a superb question, and I'm grateful that this has been brought before the committee.
There has been an awful lot of progress on this issue in the last number of years. I think we have seen the stirring of a revolution in terms of moving towards a more inclusive research environment for everybody in Canada. The reasons we want to do this are terribly straightforward.
First of all, there are basic justice issues. We don't want to be party to any sort of injustice, and exclusion creates that. That's unacceptable. Also, from a strategic point of view, inclusion means that we have brought all of our excellence to bear on the problems of our time, and that's important.
There are things that we really need to do and that have started to take place in very important ways in the Canadian landscape, especially in making sure that our entire community is really well informed about what it means to train and to operate a research lab in an inclusive way. There have been some really significant changes that Dr. Duncan, as Minister of Science, oversaw, and that meant the way grants are administered means we explicitly recognize that we should train in a thoughtful way that accounts for individual differences as well as potentially systemic obstacles.
That's just one example of progress, and I think that's important, but if we were to point to chief obstacles, I would say that one of the worst things we have to overcome is bad habits. This is another way of saying that this is really the hardest part of any problem to solve.
It has to do with entrenched cultures of practice that mean we have developed ways of approaching situations that are simply informed by a bygone era, and we need to revise the way we think. Microaggressions, for example, can be significant and essentially traumatizing for some people. The fact that in some cultures it's actually very difficult to address a question to a senior authority figure means that we need to account for that when we try to understand and reach out and engage with those people.
We need to make sure that we keep the pressure on and ensure that in trying to overcome the barriers to a really inclusive research environment, we're thinking about all of the individuals and all of the excellence they represent, which can help solve problems that we all face.