Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee.
I am a professor and Canada 150 research chair of moral psychology at UBC. I'm not here to comment on the legal or financial feasibility of the proposed monitoring body. Instead, I'm here to describe the psychological factors involved in why such a body might be necessary, how it would be received and how it might affect the mission of truth-seeking in Canada.
One finding from my research is especially relevant. We find that the perception of politicization reduces trust in and support for institutions. Critically, this occurs even for people who share the institution's perceived political orientation. Even liberals distrust institutions they see as liberally biased, and even conservatives distrust institutions they see as conservatively biased. When an expertise-based institution like science is seen as politically aligned, trust doesn't just become polarized; it erodes across the board. When that happens, truth-seeking in Canada suffers.
That politicization can come from two directions. The first is externally. When political power over institutions is used to advance contested political objectives or to manage how scientific findings are communicated, these signals cue people to interpret scientific research through their partisan lenses. Science, depending on one's political in-group, is seen as an ally or an enemy rather than as our shared common ground for truth. There is internal politicization as well. When institutions blur the line between empirical scholarship and political advocacy, or are perceived to be enforcing political conformity among their ranks, this too erodes trust in our institution. Both of these processes have undermined science in the United States. My plea is that we avoid walking further down that path in Canada.
The reason this is so fragile is rooted in basic human psychology. We are all subject to motivated reasoning and other biases, but it's much easier to see these biases in others than ourselves, something called the bias blind spot. Scientists are just as guilty. Most academics do their jobs in good faith, but we are also overconfident in our ability to detect and correct our own biases.
When we talk mostly to politically like-minded colleagues, we are subject to another well-researched process; that's the law of group polarization. When most members in a group start out leaning in one direction, the group tends to drift towards greater extremity over time. Left unchecked, groups can drift a long way indeed. Being smart is no protection from this. In fact, because motivated reasoning relies on thinking, the smarter you are, the more powerful it can be.
Science has historically managed these human tendencies not by assuming that scientists are unbiased but by building in proper incentives, norms and guardrails—peer review, replication and an environment that encourages disagreement of any idea at any time by anyone, so long as they have the evidence. Science works not just because of the abilities of scientists but also because of the constraints on them. No one likes being scrutinized, but a thoughtfully designed monitoring and accountability body could be useful in protecting these structures, thereby ensuring that Canadian science is both effective and trusted across the political spectrum.
For such a body to strengthen rather than weaken trust among both scientists and the public, its design must carefully minimize both actual and perceived politicization. Any monitoring body should, first, like the Office of the Auditor General, be visibly insulated from day-to-day partisan motives. Mechanisms like multi-party appointments and fixed or staggered terms can help ensure that the body neither is, nor appears to be, politicized.
Second, the body should audit procedural fairness and integrity, not adjudicate the merits of particular research projects. It should not try to replace peer review. The body's outputs should emphasize aggregate trend-level reporting—patterns in funding outcomes or demographic and viewpoint diversity—rather than spotlighting individual grants. Your committee, your colleagues and the public will always be able to cherry-pick research programs that sound absurd. Some really are absurd. Others lead to medical revolutions like GLP-1 agonists. It's sometimes hard to know in advance which is which. If oversight becomes focused on anecdotes, it will sow antagonism between scientists and the government, and fuel the politicization that it should be trying to extinguish.
Finally, and most mundanely, its design should actively restrain itself from mission creep and administrative overload. In other countries, comparable bodies that have been good for ensuring accountability are broadly despised because of the workload they impose. That burdensome paperwork doesn't just cause frustration; it can also reshape incentives. Time and resources shift toward timid bureaucracy rather than scientific risk-taking.
The question is not whether science needs guardrails. It does. The trick is to design a system that neither denies nor amplifies biases but disciplines them. Any accountability body should be designed to manage politicization and strengthen science rather than the other way around.
Thank you.