Political affiliation is a serious concern right now, but there are many other indicators and factors that allow us to identify groups. We are social scientists. We do well at creating metrics and following them. It is not impossible to create effective selection criteria that allow us to protect people's political affiliations—right now, we have a lot of things that are politically sensitive—but, at the same time, allow us to identify first-generation Canadians and those from groups that are not well represented in the academy and to say to them that these factors will prioritize their research so that this important issue can get on the ground.
If our application systems are so limited that our researchers are scared, we do need to re-evaluate that. Is it just EDI, or is it that we don't have a robust system of academic freedom right now that protects academics overall?
I do think that we have to make sure that these people who are coming in with high skills.... This is well documented in the medical sciences, the limitations to transitioning to Canada and to employment. We want to do the same thing for our Ph.D.s in all disciplines to make sure that we have programming that isn't EDI for the sake of faces and tokenism but that is taking people with skills and helping them transition those skills to Canada.