Science and Research Committee on Feb. 23rd, 2026

[Arif Babul]

I spent a lot of time reviewing data on this. There's now considerable research and data on the impact of inequity and bias in the system. I'm not speaking to a very specific mechanism for addressing that inequity; I will leave it to Azim to deal with that.

It is well known that this is a problem, and it works in the following way: If you are excluded in some fashion through various gatekeeping mechanisms from the early career awards, then your chances of getting a mid-career award decrease, because your awards and your award history become part of a metric for excellence. If you do not get either of those two, chances of getting a senior excellence award are further diminished.

This tends to preferentially affect women. It tends to preferentially affect people of colour. More recently, it's been shown that even within that category, there is a gradient in the sense that women of colour are the most affected by this mechanism. The fact that there is a problem is clear.

The Canadian Association of Physicists suspended their awards program for one year—I believe it was in 2021 or 2022—after a survey was carried out, and they revamped their system to re-examine whether there was bias in the system. They have launched that again.

I can give you several anecdotal examples of where this gatekeeping can work, if you wish.

[Taleeb Noormohamed, Liberal, Vancouver Granville, BC]

Yes, please. It would be interesting.

For context, you're a physicist. Is that right?

[Arif Babul]

I'm an astrophysicist.

[Taleeb Noormohamed, Liberal, Vancouver Granville, BC]

Where are you a fellow outside of Canada, in systems that perhaps might be perceived as less DEI-friendly? Could you give us some examples?

[Arif Babul]

I am a fellow of the American Physical Society. It's a much larger pool to swim in than the Canadian system, for example. I've also received prestigious awards in the U.K. Most recently, I was named to a Leverhulme visiting professorship, which I currently hold at the University of Edinburgh and held previously at the University of Oxford. I was also recently awarded the Infosys visiting chair professorship at the Indian Institute of Science, which is one of the premier science institutions in the world.

[Taleeb Noormohamed, Liberal, Vancouver Granville, BC]

Let's lean into you as an example. Would you be an EDI hire, and how did this work for you, or not?

[Arif Babul]

I was hired in Canada before EDI became a thing. I would like to think I came in based on my excellence, but what I will say is that I have personally experienced barriers in Canada specifically.

As I noted—you may have not caught on to it—I have received awards all around the world, except in Canada. I have received awards from my own university for research excellence—career-long research excellence—but not from the general community. I'm at a point in my career where I shrug my shoulders and say “whatever”, but I worry about the effect of that on younger people coming through the system. They don't have the same chances that I had outside Canada, for example.

I will mention a gatekeeping exercise. I had a colleague who graduated from an Ivy League school, had been hired previously in the United States, had done phenomenally in securing grants and early awards and came to Canada and wanted to be nominated by his colleagues for an award. His colleagues and his own department refused, to the point where he turned to me and said, “Would you mind nominating me?” I did, and it turned out that he got the first award. That first award then opened up the opportunity to secure additional awards. Today, that person is a fellow of the American Astronomical Society, who in recent years was invited to be a plenary speaker at the American Astronomical Society meetings and so on and so forth.

[Taleeb Noormohamed, Liberal, Vancouver Granville, BC]

This is because somebody gave them an opportunity to apply for something on the basis of their merit, but the door was opened because somebody understood that there are systemic barriers in place that make it difficult for certain individuals to access those awards based on their merit. Is that correct?

[Arif Babul]

Absolutely. I'll give you one more example. I'll give you one very famous example that makes the rounds in Canada.

Professor Sajeev John, in the 1990s and 2000s, was touted as a potential Nobel laureate. He is a professor at the University of Toronto. He is a physicist.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Maybe we can come to this in the second round, because the time is up for MP Noormohamed.

[Arif Babul]

Sure.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

We will now proceed to MP Blanchette-Joncas.

Please go ahead, sir.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski—La Matapédia, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I'd like to welcome the witnesses who have joined us for the first hour of this important study.

Mr. Oransky, your organization has been documenting systemic failures in the science system architecture for years, including serious methodological errors, substantial corrections and other structural flaws.

Does this situation mainly stem from individual behaviour or structural incentives related to funding, assessment mechanisms and scientific career trajectories?

[Ivan Oransky]

The answer, I would say, is both. In other words, even though I believe that real change will come only when there are changes to the incentive structure, which I will detail in one moment, it obviously still requires individuals to take part in behaviour that we may find objectionable or even may be to the point of being considered misconduct.

The incentive structure, which is quite consistent around the world, although it obviously takes different forms in different places, has been, we believe, responsible for a great deal of the misconduct—the bad behaviour—and even sometimes the acceptable but borderline behaviour. That incentive structure is based almost exclusively on what is known, of course, as “publish or perish”, which is really now what we think about as “be cited or perish”. In other words, how many times are your studies or your papers cited by other researchers?

These turn into metrics such as, for example, the metric known as an h-index, which is one measure. Universities and governments are devoted to—and I would argue maybe obsessed with—rankings that are based not exclusively but in large part on citations. What you have is a system that is from the top down, and by “from the top”, I really am referring to governments. In different parts of the world, that takes different forms. Governments could be provinces or could be other regions, and then it's from those regions or the governments themselves to the research institutions—universities, medical schools, etc.—that therefore want to be higher in the rankings so they can obtain more funding.

What happens? Search committees, deans and provosts search for and want to hire researchers who have a history of being cited more often and who therefore probably will be cited more often. It is a sort of awful cycle where a lot of people get left out, frankly, while doing really amazing work and work that is much more robust but isn't as splashy. I think it's something we all should be paying attention to.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski—La Matapédia, QC]

Is there currently an independent national body, governmental or otherwise, responsible for analyzing these incentives on a consolidated, periodic and even transparent basis?

[Ivan Oransky]

There isn't one that has any real authority. There are different organizations sometimes. I and others at the Center for Scientific Integrity are asked to give testimony or to speak with different organizations—for example, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine here in the U.S. There are other organizations that I've been invited to speak to in different parts of the world.

I don't think there's a lot of incentive to change the incentives. People talk about it a lot, but I have not seen a sustained effort that is driving toward this.

That being said, one of the things we've seen in the U.S.—and in other countries as well, but we know the U.S. best—is that different federal agencies are tasked with looking at these issues, but that ends up being its own kind of patchwork. It would be a wonderful development if there were not just a national but an international effort that looked at—I wouldn't say creating better incentives—doing away with the sorts of incentives we have now.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski—La Matapédia, QC]

Is the data related to systemic failures that you analyze generally integrated into the evaluation and adjustment of science funding policies?

[Ivan Oransky]

It is somewhat. That's changed to some extent, because about two and a half years ago, our database of retractions, which has about 63,000 retractions in it now, became fully available and open thanks to its acquisition by another non-profit called Crossref.

There are organizations, whether they're private or public, that are starting to incorporate that. For example, in India, I would argue that there is a fairly intense rankings culture. One of the agencies there has said that they were going to penalize universities that may be high in the rankings but have high retraction rates. That's actually complicated, and I don't want to make it sound like a magic wand, but it says that there is at least a growing recognition that the same behaviour that leads to high rankings—in other words, pushing and pushing papers and incentivizing papers—can also lead to misconduct and of course to retraction.

Retractions, as I'm always fond of saying, are a very imperfect metric for anything, but as part of a system of metrics or a system of looking at what's going on, they can be quite useful.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Thank you.

With that, the first round comes to an end. We will now proceed to our second round, with MP Baldinelli for five minutes.

Please go ahead.

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

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for being with us this afternoon.

Mr. Shariff, thank you for joining us today. It's good to see you again. I'm going to start with you.

In your testimony and some of the remarks you made, you spoke about science needing guardrails, and you spoke about the perception of politicalization and how it hinders trust and erodes trust. You mentioned that there are two types. You talked about external politicalization and institutional—internal—politicalization. I found your comments about the law of group polarization interesting—that if left unchecked, groups drift along the way.

Based on the comments you've made and on what I've heard from Mr. Oransky and Dr. Babul about how we go about enhancing transparency, would the Canadian science establishment benefit from establishing an independent body or function for the monitoring, analysis and accountability of federal science policies? Would it be beneficial for advancing the governance and accountability of federal science policy in institutions?

Dr. Oransky, you talked about what's happening in the United States and how it differs from Europe. Could we benefit by having a system here in Canada such as that?

The question would be for all of you.

[Ivan Oransky]

I'll answer briefly so my colleagues can give their own remarks.

There are discussions around the world, particularly in Australia—where I was recently for a meeting that was looking at some of these same issues—about how important it is for there to be an independent body. I will defer to my colleague Dr. Shariff, who can talk about how that can be upended in different ways. In fact, we are seeing that in the United States.

Let me sort of talk out of both sides of my mouth at once for a brief moment.

On the one hand, when it's done properly and it has its own guardrails, I would argue that an independent federal-level government agency like the ORI or the NSF's Office of Inspector General can serve a really important purpose if it's given the authority and the tools. It can also, however, be politicized. I think we need to be very conscious of that.

What you need to do if you're thinking about this is set up a system that allows for both things, with guardrails on both. The history of the ORI in the United States shows us this. I won't go through the whole 40-year history, of course. At different times, the way it has handled different cases has either boosted its trust or defanged it in certain ways, just to be brief about that.

In general, we think that an independent body that assures that universities are not purely investigating their own—because that is a big conflict of interest in our eyes—should exist, but I'll defer to others.

[Azim Shariff]

I can weigh in.

The question is, really, what problem are you trying to solve? One of the reasons that all three witnesses have talked about very different topics is that we're a little unsure of what this body is trying to achieve. We all have our own concerns. I have concerns about some of the topics that I've talked about, but I'm also very mindful that a lot of the cures can be worse than the disease. That is why I echo Dr. Oransky's point about having guardrails on these things and making sure they are not worsening the problem rather than improving it.

He mentioned Australia. Australia has some horror stories about the agency overpoliticizing things by micromanaging particular grants. It resulted in a lot of lost trust and conflict between science and the government, as well as politicizing science further in a way that was not helpful.

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

Go ahead, Dr. Babul.

[Arif Babul]

I would like to build on what my two colleagues have mentioned, and particularly what Dr. Shariff just spoke about, which is the mandate of this oversight body.

It's absolutely essential. If the mandate is to promote and establish improved metrics and mitigate bias, that's great. If the mandate is more than that—because governance and accountability can move in that direction—micromanaging individual grants, instead of peer review, becomes a problem. Enhancing the peer review system is a good thing.

If we are moving towards mission creep in the four areas that I specified, the discovery, the search for knowledge, is essentially a marketplace of ideas. This is where people just churn things out, and then some of these ideas turn into innovation down the road at some point. I can give you practical examples of that. Mission creep will mean that we will only fund AI-directed research or we will fund other directed research. That is dangerous because it will undermine our ecosystem.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

I'm sorry for interrupting—