Science and Research Committee on Sept. 17th, 2025

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

I call the meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number three of the Standing Committee on Science and Research.

Pursuant to the House motion of June 18, 2025, the committee is meeting to study the impact of the criteria for awarding federal funding on research excellence 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.

Before we continue, I ask all in-person participants to consult the guidelines written on the cards on the table. These measures are in place to prevent audio feedback incidents and to protect the health and safety of all participants, including the interpreters. You will also notice a QR code on the card, which links to a short awareness video.

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

Please wait until I recognize you by name before speaking. For those participating by video conference, click on the microphone icon to activate your mic. Please mute yourself when you are not speaking.

For those on Zoom, at the bottom of your screen you can select the appropriate channel for interpretation: floor, English or French. Those in the room can use the earpiece and select the desired channel.

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

I would now like to welcome our witnesses for the first panel.

We are joined by David Freeman, an associate professor from Simon Fraser University, who is joining us by video conference. We are also joined by Dr. Yuan Yi Zhu, assistant professor of international relations and international law at Leiden University.

Thank you both for appearing before the committee.

All witnesses will have five minutes for their opening remarks, and then we will proceed to the rounds of questioning.

Mr. Freeman, we will start with you. You have five minutes for your opening remarks. Thank you.

[David Freeman, Associate Professor, Simon Fraser University, As an Individual]

Thank you, Madam Chair, for inviting me.

Let me start by introducing myself. I'm a professor of economics at Simon Fraser University and I research behavioural and experimental economics. I'm personally grateful to SSHRC for support for my own work as an M.A. and Ph.D. student at UBC and now as a faculty member at SFU.

As background, I served on four SSHRC insight development grant adjudication committees for economics from 2020 to 2023. Let me start with my experience there.

My experience was quite positive. Members were well qualified. They took the task seriously and they were committed to funding the best proposals according to the standards of economics. Criteria are reasonably well specified to enable the committee to do that. I actually liked working with these criteria better than, say, the NSF criteria. The SSHRC criteria are just easier to interpret.

Disciplinary evaluation does what it is intended to do: It picks the best proposals according to the standards of each discipline. Academia is organized by discipline, so this is a sensible way of adjudicating proposals. However, SSHRC lacks good criteria for allocating money across disciplines and programs. I don't have a perfect solution, but I want to point to three issues and offer some incremental suggestions that might better align SSHRC funding with the priorities of Canadians.

Number one, let's talk about the SSHRC talent program, which funds fellowships and scholarships for graduate students and post-docs. I think the distribution of that is out of line.

Let's just pick a little example here. In 2024, the talent program funded 140 scholarships and fellowships in sociology, 155 in history, only 52 in business and 40 in economics. Now, at a typical university, both business and economics are much larger departments than history and sociology. It almost goes without saying that there's much more demand for business and economics Ph.D.s as well, so I think this allocation of funding is perverse. I don't mean to pick on these disciplines in particular; it's to generate a more general problem.

I recommend that SSHRC rethink how it allocates talent program funding across disciplines. It could consider another metric—like the number of students graduating in a year—for allocating funding across disciplines and maybe make an adjustment for the market demand for graduates.

The second point is that Canada is way behind other jurisdictions in providing high-quality datasets to social science researchers, and SSHRC should have funding to address this. There's just way more influential work in economics using Swedish and American datasets than using Canadian datasets, even if you adjust for Canada being a smaller country than America.

The research we do have from Canada has generated important insights into unique Canadian policies and institutions, but when we don't have the data to do that research, we have to rely on imperfect lessons from elsewhere. I recommend that SSHRC set aside funds for research that uses Canadian data and creates new Canadian datasets.

The third point is a tricky one. I want to discuss activist research in SSHRC disciplines. Some approaches to scholarship focus on normative as opposed to positive questions. Some even reject the distinction between pursuit of truth and pursuit of activism. This is highly discipline-dependent, and it exists on a continuum in the disciplines where there are some of these approaches.

Here's the problem: Activist faculty are almost universally left to far left in their politics, and advocacy-oriented scholarship methods are prone to the influence of researcher biases, views and morals. In my opinion, the lack of political balance among advocacy-oriented researchers risks social buy-in for universities as institutions.

Is it legitimate for a broad spectrum of Canadian taxpayers to fund left and far-left advocacy under the guise of research funding? I think the answer is no, but this is an exceptionally tricky problem to address in a principled way. I don't have a perfect solution, but let me offer some ideas.

First, I suggest that funding envelopes prioritize core research through the insight program.

Second, insight program criteria should not value normative and activist research, nor should they value non-academic outputs as knowledge mobilization.

Third, I suggest that SSHRC revamp any EDI policies to make viewpoint diversity, especially political viewpoint diversity, the primary priority.

Finally, I suggest that the government get a politically balanced and representative governing council for each of the tri-councils. Researchers can seek connections and partnerships on their own, and they can engage in political activism on their own dime and on their own time.

To summarize, I recommend that SSHRC distribute graduate scholarships by student numbers, fund Canadian data and rethink funding for activist research.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Thanks a lot.

We will now proceed to our second witness for this panel, Dr. Yi Zhu.

The floor is yours. You have five minutes for your opening remarks.

[Yuan Yi Zhu, Assistant Professor of International Relations and International Law, Leiden University, As an Individual]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, members of the committee, for being here. It's a pleasure to be back in Ottawa to testify in front of you today.

Every year, the federal Government of Canada spends billions of dollars on research funding. Canadians rightly expect that this money will be used by and allocated to the most deserving researchers, based on excellence and excellence alone, in order for them to pursue high-quality research that will benefit Canadians and humanity in general. Sadly, this is no longer the case.

Today, federal research funding is often allocated on the basis of race, sex, gender identity, ideological conformity and other criteria that have nothing to do with the pursuit of truth and excellence. Thus, today, we have federally funded Canada research chair positions that are available only to people of a certain race or a certain sex, or a combination of both, even though none of these characteristics have anything to do with the quality of somebody's research. Indeed, universities may lose their funding under the Canada research chairs program unless they meet diversity quotas in the recruitment of professors.

Today, we have federally funded research programs that expect “applicants to clearly demonstrate their strong commitment to EDI in their applications”, as well as to integrate EDI in their “research practice and design”. With respect, the purpose of research design is to enable research to be done; it is not to promote specific ideological objectives.

In addition, there are many informal obstacles to the pursuit of excellence in the federal funding system for research. For example, in the humanities and social sciences, where I'm from, it is well known that research proposals that contain buzzwords and fashionable, progressive language have a much better chance of being funded than proposals for more traditional subjects that adopt more traditional approaches. This means that from the beginning of their careers, young scholars are taught that the way to get ahead in academia is to be a conformist and chase grant money using buzzwords, regardless of what they actually believe is intellectually valuable and important.

Like Dr. Freeman, I speak to this committee as a former recipient of money from SSHRC, money that enabled me to do my Ph.D. I'm very grateful to the Canadian taxpayer, SSHRC and the federal government for enabling me to have a career as an academic, which I would not have been able to pursue otherwise.

Naturally, I'm a strong believer in the value of investing public money in research. However, in these economically difficult times, many Canadians question the value of giving money to academics to study subjects that may sometimes seem irrelevant to their lives and personal struggles. The heavy-handed imposition of EDI and other ideological requirements in public research funding undermine public support for this funding and threaten the future of Canadian higher education. That is something that I think needs to be addressed, and urgently so.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

We will now proceed to our rounds of questioning. We will begin the first round of six minutes with MP Baldinelli.

Go ahead. You have six minutes.

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

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for being here today.

Mr. Zhu, it's your second time appearing as a witness on this study topic. You appeared at this committee in the previous Parliament on November 28, 2024. I believe it was during meeting 111. Looking back at that evidence, it's quite clear there were some technical issues that prevented you from fully participating in that meeting. These issues also disrupted the members' opportunity to engage with you by asking questions and getting your testimony.

We're pleased that you're back here today. Thank you for doing that.

During the meeting on November 28, the chair at the time invited you to submit any further testimony by way of a brief. I want to know if you were able to do so.

[Yuan Yi Zhu]

I was not able to do so last time, but I will do so after this meeting today.

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

Thank you so much.

In your opening statement on November 28, 2024, you said:

Today, federal research funding is often allocated on the basis of race, sex, ideological conformity and other criteria that have nothing to do with the pursuit of truth and excellence.

In your view, what risks and dangers to Canadian research excellence are caused by this DEI approach?

[Yuan Yi Zhu]

Thank you for this question.

First, this is not hidden. If you go to the website of any of the research councils, there are pages dedicated to EDI policies and programs that are very specifically tailored to advance certain viewpoints and to advance certain minority groups.

The truth is that.... Look, research is about, I believe, the pursuit of truth and excellence. If you tell researchers beforehand that you may give them money as long as they do research that checks these boxes in EDI or that they get money if they are of a certain race or whatever, that shrinks the pool of people who are eligible. People who do not fit or who don't have these personal characteristics don't get the money. People who want to do certain types of research that are less fashionable and are less ideologically on board with EDI don't get the money. The money goes to a smaller pool of people. This very often encourages people to lie about what they actually want to research. As a researcher, when I do a grant proposal, I have to think that if this what I want to research, what do they want to read in terms of the proposal? We are encouraged, actually, to be dishonest.

Moreover, as I think Dr. Freeman also pointed out, a lot of the money goes to a number of very ideological researchers. I'm not saying that they should not get any money; I'm saying that they should not get special treatment.

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

It's interesting. In effect, people are committing academic dishonesty by having to lie on an application to ensure that they can get a program funded on the basis of research excellence. I think there's something wrong with that system when we're creating a system like that.

Mr. Freeman, you recently wrote an article that was published in The Hub. It was entitled “Canada’s universities have lost their way. So why do we keep giving them public money with no strings attached?” In the opening paragraph, you observed, “Something is seriously wrong with universities.”

What are some of those issues that you observed and identified that led you to this claim?

[David Freeman]

Thanks very much for the question.

For me, as a Jewish faculty member, the kind of response after October 7 really hit home. Seeing many faculty kind of celebrating the Hamas massacre really hit home for me. I could talk more about that, and then also the outwelling of support for that side following that.

That really hit home, but I think that's just a symptom of a much larger problem. Yuan and I talk about the other facets of it. I think the ideological imbalance and the cancel culture that has been documented in various sources are really deep problems. If we want universities to be places that promote truth, promote discourse across diverse viewpoints and build knowledge that serves Canadians, that Canadians can trust.

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

I think you mentioned that notion, the notion of the truth. You talked about, in your opening comments, “activist research”. Instead of the pursuit of truth, the pursuit of activism kind of slants the findings of the research that you're trying to do.

[David Freeman]

I think that's certainly true in some disciplines and for some researchers. It's a continuum. It's very hard to draw a hard line as to what's activist and what's not.

If you, let's say, believe that the truth is highly subjective and believe that what you say contributes to a discourse that contributes to power relations, you might very well want to be selective in the evidence you use in order to promote one side—perhaps to promote whoever you think happens to be more oppressed—as sort of one kind of ideology within the broad spectrum of the academic ideas space.

I think what I'm calling more broadly “activist research” is very well ingrained in parts of academia. I'm not saying we should get rid of it—

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

If I may, Professor Freeman, I have only about 15 seconds left.

A previous witness who appeared on Monday said that there is very little monitoring of the monies that go out in the research funding that is being shared. Do you agree with that comment?

[David Freeman]

It's true, but as a researcher, it's really hard to understand the useful direction that I should go in when I write a grant application. If I'm writing a grant application honestly, it's for research that I haven't actually done. Early in the research, I might learn something and take a bit of a different direction, and so—

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

I'm sorry for interrupting. Your time is up. Maybe you will get an opportunity in the second round. Thank you.

With that, we will proceed to MP Rana.

MP Rana, you have six minutes for your round of questioning. Please begin.

[Aslam Rana, Liberal, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thanks to the witnesses for spending their time with us this Wednesday evening to discuss federal funding criteria and research excellence in Canada.

My first question is for Dr. Zhu.

You have been vocal about the way academia is driving away potential Nobel Prize winners. However, in Canada, we recently celebrated Dr. Geoffrey Hinton's landmark achievement in winning the Nobel Prize in physics, which was a strong testament to Canadian excellence and the merits of Canadian funding agencies. In fact, our government is investing $734 million to support Canada's world-leading research infrastructure and institutes and to help the next generation of researchers discover new scientific breakthroughs.

Could you speak more to why it's important to fund researchers, even if the research seems far-fetched and maybe even odd to those outside the research community?

[Yuan Yi Zhu]

Thank you for your question. I didn't catch the last bit of your question, but I think I got the gist of it.

Canada is a very lucky country, in that we have world-leading researchers. Nobody's disputing that. We, frankly, punch above our weight. We have lots of talent. As I said, I'm a supporter of the federal government in spending money on research. Not everybody is. I think it's a good thing, broadly speaking. I think we can probably afford it as a country.

The truth of the matter is that, especially for things like natural sciences, it can be very hard for research councils to identify promising research. Research funding is inherently unpredictable. You give money to people, thinking that they show promise. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. It's hit and miss. The problem with research councils being a bit too narrow-minded is that they think, “This is the next big thing. I'm going to give them lots of money”, but sometimes the next big thing is not the next big thing; it doesn't work out, or it's actually not a big thing. That is one of the arguments in favour of being more open-minded and more diverse in terms of what we fund, because you never know what's going to be a world-changing project and what's going to be a bust.

There was a case last year of somebody in the U.S. who won a Nobel Prize in medicine. For decades, she had no job in academia because everybody said that her research didn't matter. She had no money and she worked on her own until she got the Nobel Prize for helping to develop the COVID vaccine. That is an example of what happens very often in research: Promising ideas don't get funded because funders—the bureaucrats who make these funding decisions—have tunnel vision. They chase the next big thing, but sometimes it doesn't work out.

[Aslam Rana, Liberal, Hamilton Centre, ON]

In an article published by UnHerd in 2023, you stated, “The fact that the acceptance and rejection decisions are usually made by other researchers in the same field only seems to intensify the sense that the entire system is broken.”

Could you please expand on this argument?

[Yuan Yi Zhu]

Sir, what is the article in question?

[Aslam Rana, Liberal, Hamilton Centre, ON]

It was your article that refers to the fact that acceptance and rejection decisions are usually made by other researchers in the same field.

[Yuan Yi Zhu]

Oh, yes. Thank you.

This is a bit of a tricky question because, on the one hand, when you think about who is best placed to judge what's good research and what's not, it's people in the same discipline, but the danger is that people in the same discipline share orthodoxies and are unwilling to fund research that breaks those orthodoxies. This is especially an issue in Canada, because we're not actually a very big country. In any given discipline, there might be a few hundred researchers, and the people who are on the grant panels tend to be the same sort of senior people. If you say, “I want money to disprove what you built a career on”, sometimes that person will say, “I don't actually want you to disprove what I built my career on. I want to fund people who actually have the same approach.”

That's another argument for why we should be much more open-minded and have a broader basis of funding for research, because senior people especially can sometimes be very wedded to their legacies in a way that can be counterproductive.

[Aslam Rana, Liberal, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you.

Mr. Freeman, I will switch to you. I want to look into your time at Simon Fraser University.

How can we safeguard research funding to remain independent and resilient over the long term, particularly from political influence?

[David Freeman]

That's a super-tough question.

Everyone on the adjudication committee is going to bring their own political biases to it. Giving a lot of independence to universities and to the adjudication committees is step one. Step two is also just depoliticizing academia. There's no easy way to do that, and this isn't entirely federal jurisdiction, but it's getting universities to adopt [Technical difficulty—Editor] so that [Technical difficulty—Editor] in these departments themselves aren't pushing a political agenda. It's pushing for political diversity in universities so that at least people have to engage with arguments from all sides.

I don't really care about the political orientation of a physicist, but maybe in the interpretive social sciences and humanities this is a little more important. I think pushing for political diversity in universities will help safeguard political independence, but that's very tricky to do. How do you do that without basically discriminating based on political beliefs, which I'm not super-comfortable with? It's a tricky problem.

I'm happy to offer some other ideas and write them up.

[Aslam Rana, Liberal, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Over the years, what changes have you seen to research funding and academic freedom? Have you seen any changes?