Science and Research Committee on Sept. 15th, 2025

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

I call the meeting to order.

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to meeting number two of the Standing Committee on Science and Research.

Pursuant to the motion of the committee on June 18, 2025, the committee is meeting to study the impact that the criteria for awarding federal funding have on research excellence here in Canada.

Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format. Pursuant to the Standing Orders, members are attending in person, in the room, and remotely by using the Zoom application. I think all of the members are in person right now for this one.

Before we continue, I would like to ask all in-person participants to consult the guidelines written on the cards on the table. These measures are in place to help prevent audio and feedback incidents and to protect the health and safety of all of the participants, including the interpreters.

You will also notice a QR code on the card. It links to a short awareness video.

I would like to make few comments for the benefit of witnesses and members.

Please wait until I recognize you by name before speaking. To those participating by video conference, click on the microphone icon to activate your mic, and please mute yourself when you are not speaking. Those of you on Zoom can select the appropriate channel for “floor”, “English” or “French” at the bottom of your screen. Those in the room can use the earpiece and select the desired channel.

I will remind you that all comments should be addressed through the chair. Members in the room, if you wish to speak, please raise your hand. Members on Zoom, please use the “raise hand” function. The clerk and I will manage the speaking order as best as we can, and we appreciate your patience and understanding in this regard.

I would like to welcome our three witnesses for this panel. We are joined virtually by Gita Ljubicic, professor at McMaster University. We are joined in person by Steven Pinker, Johnstone family professor of psychology, Harvard University. The third witness for today is Azim Shariff, professor at the University of British Columbia. He has joined us via video conference.

Welcome, and thanks a lot for coming.

With that, we will go to the witnesses.

The first one will be Ms. Gita Ljubicic. You will have five minutes for your opening remarks. Please go ahead.

[Gita Ljubicic, Professor, McMaster University, As an Individual]

Thank you so much.

I'm just checking.... We can't see you online. Are we only doing audio, or do we have video too in the room?

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Thank you.

I think there are some technical issues, but we can see you. You can go ahead with your five minutes. The clerk is looking into that.

Thank you.

[Gita Ljubicic]

Thank you for the opportunity to appear before this committee on science and research today. It's an honour to share my experiences on how federal funding criteria impact research excellence in Canada.

Public investment in research is vital for advancing knowledge, solving complex problems and training future researchers. However, evaluating proposals is challenging. Reviewers aim to fund research that positively impacts Canadians through innovation, evidence and creativity, and in ways that improve our understanding of the world, quality of life and equity.

Conventional measures of excellence often focus on quantitative indicators like the number of grants, publications, awards and scholarships; the number of students graduated; an individual's track record; and proposal strength. While these do reflect academic productivity, they don't always capture real-world impacts, such as informing policy and community decisions, improving health and education practices and outcomes, supporting economic growth, advancing reconciliation, and promoting environmental sustainability and social equity. Researchers highlight these impacts in applications, but measuring them remains difficult, and this creates challenges for rigorous, fair and consistent approaches to evaluation.

My name is Gita Ljubicic. I'm a professor in the school of earth, environment and society at McMaster University, and I lead the StraightUpNorth, or SUN, research team. I'm a geographer, trained in both natural and social sciences, working at the intersection of cultural and environmental geography. My research is rooted in respectful collaboration with indigenous knowledge holders to address complex social and ecological issues. For over 25 years I've worked primarily with Inuit communities in Nunavut, and, through students and collaborators, I've been involved in projects across Inuit Nunangat—which are Inuit homelands in the Canadian Arctic—and with first nations and Métis communities in Yukon and Northwest Territories. Our SUN team aims to ensure that research benefits our community partners, informs decision-making, improves research practice and supports emerging northern researchers.

My recommendations here today reflect personal experience in community-engaged and interdisciplinary research. Federal funding criteria must include qualitative indicators that rigorously and fairly assess research excellence. I have experience working with NSERC, SSHRC, CIHR—receiving those funds as well as reviewing applications—and interdisciplinary initiatives through the tri-council, Environment and Climate Change Canada, and Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada.

Funding policies have evolved to better support interdisciplinary research, EDI initiatives, indigenous leadership partnerships, early career researchers, mentorship, and knowledge mobilization. However, alongside these important policy changes, targeted funding opportunities and new requirements in proposals, the conventional quantitative and academic focus metrics of excellence need to be re-envisioned.

There are six ways that I propose this can be achieved, and I would be happy to expand on any of these today or in follow-up written testimony. My suggestions are to ensure the representation of reviewers with direct cultural or community-specific experience in funding evaluation committees; to ensure the representation of early career researchers as reviewers for early career research-specific funding pools; to consider the amount of time dedicated to community-engaged and partnership research when assessing the rationale, methodology, budget and claims of significance in a proposal; to extend consideration of training and mentorship contributions beyond academic, highly qualified personnel; to assess partnerships according to their diversity of roles, strengths of relationships and evidence of collective planning and implementation; and to recognize that knowledge mobilization goes beyond academic audiences and public outreach.

In the few minutes I've had today, I've offered these six specific recommendations to refine how federal research funding is assessed and allocated.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Can you please wind up?

[Gita Ljubicic]

Yes.

How excellence is defined influences the conduct of partnerships, approaches to mentorship and whether disciplinary norms evolve to meet complex challenges, so alongside academic records, we must assess impact track records.

Five minutes is a short time to present substantive ideas. The committee's study here deserves thoughtful discussion. I welcome the opportunity for more dialogue today and to further contribute to the committee initiatives in the future.

Thank you. Merci. Qujannamiik.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Thanks a lot.

With that, we will now proceed to our second witness, Mr. Pinker.

Mr. Pinker, you have five minutes for your opening remarks. Please go ahead.

[Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, As an Individual]

Madam Zahid, Monsieur Blanchette-Joncas and members of the Standing Committee on Science and Research, as a proud Canadian and graduate of Dawson College and McGill University, it is a tremendous honour to speak to you today about diversity in science.

Starting in the late 1970s, the concept of diversity became popular in the United States after the Supreme Court ruled—

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

I'm sorry for interrupting, Mr. Pinker.

There is some technical difficulty. We have to suspend the meeting for a minute so that the clerk can look into this.

Thank you, Mr. Pinker. Again, I'm sorry for interrupting.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

I call the meeting back to order.

I'm sorry about that. I will instruct the clerk, for future purposes, to also do the checks with the witnesses present in the room.

We will go back to Mr. Pinker.

We will give you five minutes, so please start from the beginning. Thank you, Mr. Pinker.

[Steven Pinker]

Madam Zahid, Monsieur Blanchette-Joncas, and members of the Standing Committee on Science and Research, as a proud Canadian and graduate of Dawson College and McGill University, it's a tremendous honour to speak to you today about diversity in science.

Starting in the late 1970s, the concept of diversity became popular in the United States after the Supreme Court ruled that explicit racial quotas in university admissions were a form of unconstitutional discrimination, but that it was acceptable for schools to favour minority students if the goal was to enhance the educational experience of all students by having a diverse student body. Over time, the laudable goal of diversity morphed into policies that increasingly used race and sex as criteria in admissions, hiring and funding. That was the “D” in DEI, or EDI.

More recently, the term “viewpoint diversity” became popular as an ironic response to racial and gender diversity. The joke went that in a university, “diversity” means people who look different and think alike; viewpoint diversity, in contrast, is the form of diversity that really matters in scientific and intellectual life. It is simply not true—indeed, one might say it is a form of prejudice—to assume that all women or all members of a racial or ethnic minority think in a particular way.

A diversity of viewpoints, though, is necessary to do science properly. This is not because diversity is aesthetically pleasing; it's because people are not omniscient or infallible. As a cognitive scientist, I can attest that the human mind is vulnerable to many biases and fallacies. The strongest is the “myside” bias, the conviction that my own tribe, coalition or party is correct and that a rival coalition is ignorant or evil or both. People are poor at spotting their own biases. As the economist Joan Robinson put it, “Ideology is like breath. You never smell your own.”

The reason that science can proceed despite these blind spots is that we're much better at spotting someone else's biases. In a community in which people with different viewpoints can criticize those they disagree with without fear of punishment, censorship or cancellation, one person can point out another's errors, and the whole community can be more rational than any of the individuals in it.

In contrast, there are several reasons to fear that diversity, in the DEI sense of allocating funding to scientists based on their race or sex, works against the interests of science and the nation.

First, it can be inherently unfair. Funding is a zero-sum game. If people of one sex or skin colour are given an advantage, then others of a different sex or skin colour are being put at a disadvantage. This was the reason that my own institution lost another famous Supreme Court case, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, in 2023. The court ruled that in favouring Hispanics and African Americans in admissions, Harvard was unconstitutionally discriminating against Asian Americans.

Second, it can be a waste of taxpayer money if grant dollars don't go to the scientific research that is judged to be of the highest quality and priority. Of course, reviewers of grant proposals are themselves subject to biases, including racism and sexism, but this means that the biases themselves should be minimized through blind review, audits and the most objective measures of quality and influence we can find.

Third, while it's laudable to attract the widest range of talent in science and to overcome past barriers to inclusion, the awarding of grants takes place at the end of the science training pipeline, far too late in a person's life to rectify social and historical inequities. Obsessing over statistical differences in the awarding of research grants draws attention away from formative influences that create inequities in the first place, including education from the preschool years through university as well as social and cultural norms that make science attractive as a career.

Finally, the promotion of diversity in gender and ethnicity at the same time that diversity in opinion is constricted by censorship, cancellation or intellectual monocultures undermines public trust in science. I often mention to audiences or interviewers that the massive scientific consensus is that human activity is warming the planet. Many times a listener has replied, “But why should we trust the consensus if it comes from a clique that does not favour the best science and that punishes anyone who disagrees with the orthodoxy?”

Recent events in the United States—with which, I'm guessing, you're familiar—illustrate the dangers that can result when politicians and the public lose trust in science.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Thank you, Mr. Pinker.

We will now go to Mr. Shariff, who has joined this panel through video conference.

Mr. Shariff, you can go ahead. You will have five minutes for your opening remarks.

[Azim Shariff, Professor, The University of British Columbia, As an Individual]

Thank you for the opportunity to speak before this committee.

My name is Azim Shariff, and I'm a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia. I was born and educated in Canada—first at the University of Toronto and then, for my doctorate, at UBC—and I later held faculty positions in the U.S. before being invited back home under the Canada 150 research chairs program. In light of this committee's study, my most useful contribution today will be to share my observations about how well-intentioned policies surrounding the Canada research chair program have played out in practice.

As you all know, the CRC program serves as one of Canada's primary tools for attracting and retaining highly impactful researchers. To fulfill its mandate to support research excellence, the program has, over its 25-year tenure, adjusted its policies with regard to equity, diversity and inclusion. There are many rationales for why academia should prioritize these values: A faculty that is more representative of the Canadian population earns trust and legitimacy with the community; it is also more tuned to the full spectrum of questions that Canadians care about. Chief among the reasons, from a public interest standpoint, is that removing barriers to access means that nothing prevents the most talented scholars from transmuting their talent into the products of research that benefit us all.

To achieve this goal, the CRC program set 2029 equity targets for groups that were severely under-represented at the program's outset: women and gender equity-seeking groups; racialized individuals, like me; persons with disabilities; and indigenous peoples. The targets have been, largely, reached nationally for all groups.

That said, not all targets for all groups have been reached at all institutions. As per the 2019 policy adjustment, so long as an institution trails behind its targets on any one group, it is restricted from submitting new chair holder nominations for individuals outside of any of these groups.

There are two concerns with this policy in terms of how it operates on the ground.

First, aggregating the equity groups in this way serves as a blunt and sometimes ineffective way of addressing barriers. The pool of scholars who are racialized individuals or are from women and gender equity-seeking groups is much larger and is therefore much easier to hire from than the pool of indigenous peoples or persons with disabilities. As a consequence, the policy incentivizes some institutions—like mine—to swell their ranks of women and racialized individuals well beyond their targets while continuing to trail the targets for the latter two groups.

The second concern is the impact on the public interest of the restriction in the first place. As I noted earlier, any barrier to equal access impoverishes everyone because it fails to position the most talented individuals into the roles where their talent can do the most good, yet with the restrictive policy, the CRC program employs exactly this kind of barrier—closing doors rather than opening them.

Here is a case study of how this plays out. Several years ago, my department sought to fill a tier one CRC vacancy. We were replacing the retiring director of a highly productive global excellence research cluster on language sciences. Since this needed to be a senior scholar with a particular expertise, the pool of candidates was already small. Since it was a CRC hire, the pool was further narrowed to members of the four equity-seeking groups, excluding many of the most relevant and impactful scholars. This left very few qualified candidates, and indeed only one was both above our thresholds and open to moving from her institution in the U.S. Unable to meet her requirements and without any backup options, the search failed, the CRC was revoked, and the future of the institute and the research cluster is now in jeopardy.

Equity and social justice are important goals of the CRC program. However, by explicitly excluding a body of scholars, this restrictive policy creates an unnecessary conflict. It sets those aims against the program's broader goal of improving our depth of knowledge and quality of life for all Canadians, leaving talent on the table.

This is especially pressing right now. We're currently seeing the academic environment in the United States undermined by attacks on academic freedom and by devastating cuts to research funding. America is the global centre of science and research. The whole world will lose out from the disruption to knowledge creation that they will now experience. Canada is best positioned to pick up that slack. For high-impact scholars choosing to leave the U.S., the most attractive alternatives are to come to the University of Toronto, Waterloo or UBC.

The world needs these people to remain productive. I would encourage Canada to reconsider the trade-offs involved in keeping one hand of its CRC program tied behind its back. We should refine our policies accordingly. Science and scholarship work best when everyone is invited to participate.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Thank you. That was right on time.

Now we will go to our rounds of questioning. In the first round, you'll have six minutes each. We will start with Mr. Baldinelli.

Please go ahead. You have six minutes for your round of questioning.

[Tony Baldinelli, Conservative, Niagara Falls—Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

It's good to see all of my colleagues again. I look forward to working with all of you on this committee as we proceed. Thank you to the witnesses for being here as well.

It's an important study; this past July, the industry minister announced that $1.3 billion had been awarded in federal research funding. This study, which we're picking up, builds upon the work of the committee from the previous Parliament and wants to examine and receive input and feedback on the various criteria used in awarding these federal funds.

Ms. Ljubicic, you talked about the use of quantitative criteria and how that may be harmful. We've heard previous testimony from colleges that say they're precluded from some of this research funding, for example. We've also heard about the issue of DEI and its use in criteria, and how that may impact science as well.

Mr. Pinker, I'd like to thank you for your comments. You talked about how DEI works against the interests of science.

I was looking back at some of the previous testimony. Going back to November 2024, we had Dr. Jeremy Kerr, a professor at the department of biology at the University of Ottawa. When he was asked by one of the committee members, “How important are diversity and inclusion in research when producing reliable and accurate data?”, he replied, “I want to be really clear here. As I said, our objective is not to implement an affirmative action program; our objective is to achieve excellence, on behalf of Canadians....”

That's not to say that a diversity of views or diverse backgrounds are not important. Can you pick up on what you said in some of your comments and that notion of how DEI works against the interests of science?

[Steven Pinker]

It very much echoes my remarks that a diversity of viewpoints is essential because of the cognitive limitations that lead people to overvalue their own viewpoint. It's only by getting opposing viewpoints that, collectively, we can hope to be more rational and be better able to seek the truth than any of us can do individually.

A diversity of skin colour or a diversity of chromosomes is no guarantee of better science, because people of a given ethnicity or of a given sex don't all think alike. If we had fair criteria to pick the best scientists and the best science, that would ideally be the ultimate way of reducing discrimination, because it would zero in on quality, ignoring irrelevant criteria such as skin colour or sex.

[Tony Baldinelli, Conservative, Niagara Falls—Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON]

Thank you.

Professor Shariff, you also mentioned that barriers to equal access harm all. Closing doors, rather than opening them, is harmful in the use of the criteria.

Can you expand on that?

[Azim Shariff]

The point I was trying to make is that with the CRC program, there is an explicit policy to bar a certain demographic—that is, able-bodied white men—from being nominated for these chairs and from using these chairs to attract them or retain them in Canada.

I feel that whenever you shrink the pool of talent you're picking from, you're more likely to miss out on the most talented individuals. I don't think it's something that we should explicitly restrict by any means.

[Tony Baldinelli, Conservative, Niagara Falls—Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON]

Thank you for that. To your point, it also leads to faulty science.

I was reading an article by Geoff Horsman, who's an associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Wilfrid Laurier University. When he was talking to a colleague, this colleague basically said to him, “I have made my peace with EDI. I will lie about my most deeply held beliefs or convictions on paper in order to get funding.” They're basically saying that if you believe in merit and competency, shut up and just lie on your application to get the funding. That doesn't advance science.

What we have now is individuals being put in a position where they know that unless they tick off a box, they're not going to get their program funded.

I was wondering if you could elaborate on that.

[Steven Pinker]

Yes, well, many American universities require so-called “diversity statements” in which an applicant for a professorship has to basically endorse the policies of DEI, including racial preferences, and has to endorse the critical social justice theory as to why there are racial disparities.

I've had students who've had ChatGPT write their diversity statements because they could not honestly fill them out. It would go against their conscience to say things that they knew were not true, but they knew they would be blackballed and eliminated from a job if they expressed their true opinions. That's one of the reasons that many universities—now including my own, Harvard—have got rid of diversity statements.

Also, I think it is a peculiar version of social justice that says that the composition of a scientific body, a university body or a pool of funded scientists has to match the demographics of the population at large. It leads to, I think, rather monstrous consequences, like saying that there are too many Asians on a committee, or that too many Asians are getting funded, or too many Jews, or too many Sikhs or too many Arabs. It is just not going to be the case that every ethnic group or every sex is going to be perfectly represented in proportion to their membership in the population. If we are truly seeking quality, that should not matter. We don't have to count. There may be discrepancies, and they can go in different directions, but if we're funding the best science, we get the best science.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Thank you, Mr. Pinker. Your time is up.

I'll just remind all the members that all the questions should be directed through the chair.

We will go to MP Noormohamed for six minutes.

[Taleeb Noormohamed, Liberal, Vancouver Granville, BC]

Thank you so much, Chair.

Thank you to our witnesses for being here.

I'm going to pick up, Professor Shariff, where you left off.

It's good to see you again. It's been a long time—probably 30 years or maybe longer. It's great to see you.

I want to pick up where you left off in terms of talking about the importance of making sure that we are able to attract and keep our best and brightest minds, regardless of some of these criteria. Some of these criteria may be important, but we should not index on those in making sure that we have the best folks around the table,.

What, in your view, is the best way for Canada to approach poaching talent—I'm going to say it bluntly—from the U.S., where folks are feeling uncomfortable right now about the threats to academia and there is this pervasive attitude that you have to think a certain way or else your funding is going to be cut? What do we need to make sure that we aren't falling into the wrong traps on either side of this conversation, to make sure that we're attracting the best talent—without leaning in on this perceived attack on “woke ideology”, which I want to get to, whatever the hell that means—in a way that gets us the best talent here and allows us to do the best types of research while also building an inclusive environment for academics?

[Azim Shariff]

One of the areas of my research is looking at institutional trust and perceived politicization. One of the challenges that we've discovered is that once people perceive an institution to be politicized, it has a negative impact on trust, not just for the people who perceive the institution to be on the opposite side from their politics but also for the people who perceive the institution to be on the same side as their politics. Scientists, the consumers of science and the consumers of scholarship do not want their institutions to be politicized.

Canada, unfortunately, has a reputation of having a somewhat politicized academy. Dr. Pinker talked about the impact that the perceptions of politicization are now having in the U.S.; Canada has an opportunity here to try to be a safe haven for a more objective, less politicized academy. People who are trying to flee a politicized and undermined academic environment in the U.S. could hopefully find a more flexible, free funding climate in Canada, as well as an academy that tries to lower the temperature on politicization.

Politicization in science is like bacteria in an operating room. There's no way you'll be able to get rid of it entirely, but you do want to do as much as you can to remove it. I don't think you should trust any surgeon who's not trying to do that.

[Taleeb Noormohamed, Liberal, Vancouver Granville, BC]

Thank you.

I'm going to follow up with one more question for you, and then I'm going to throw the same question over to Professor Pinker.

In watching President Trump's attacks on my two alma maters, Princeton and Harvard, and the threats of cuts, what we've seen are cuts to funding for cancer research, diabetes, new ways of farming, preschool development and teacher quality. These are all things that have been affected by this attack on what is being termed “woke ideology”. We've heard this term “woke ideology” being used by the Leader of the Opposition in this country; he says wants to cut “woke ideology” from Canadian universities.

When you hear terms like that and the types of attacks on universities that are being made under that guise and that cover, does it concern you that Canada might go down a similar road in terms of using that as a cover to attack academic freedom, academic research and academic intellectual expansion?

[Azim Shariff]

Yes, it does concern me. As I said, there's a danger of politicization, which attracts targeting from both sides. There's a sociologist and physician at Yale University named Nicholas Christakis. He had an interesting point that once universities made themselves political actors, they made themselves political targets. I think we're seeing that very much in the United States. It should be in Canada's interest to do everything it can to avoid the fate that academia is now having there in the U.S.