Science and Research Committee on Sept. 22nd, 2025

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

I call this meeting to order. Welcome to meeting four of the Standing Committee on Science and Research.

Pursuant to the motion on June 18, 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 help prevent audio and feedback incidents and to protect the health and safety of all participants, including our amazing 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 the 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, and 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. For those in the room, you can use the earpiece and select the desired channel. I remind you that 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 as we can, and we appreciate your patience and understanding in this regard.

I would like to welcome our witnesses on this panel today. We are joined by Dr. Wendy Cukier, professor of entrepreneurship and strategy at Ted Rogers School of Management, and academic director of the diversity institute; Christopher Dummitt, professor of Canadian studies, Trent University, and he's joining by video conference; and Yves Gingras, scientific director, observatory of science and technology, Université du Québec à Montreal. We are joined by Dr. Mahadeo Sukhai from IDEA-STEM Consulting Incorporated. He is the chief operating officer and chief scientific officer.

I ask the members who will address the witnesses to identify themselves first, please.

We start our panel today with Dr. Mahadeo Sukhai.

You have five minutes, Dr. Sukhai, for your opening remarks. Please go ahead.

[Mahadeo Sukhai, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Scientific Officer, IDEA-STEM Consulting Inc.]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Good morning, committee members. Thank you for the invitation to speak with you.

Federal research funding plays a critical role in sustaining Canada's science, technology, innovation and research enterprise, in building our nation and in positioning Canada on the world stage. Hopefully, we all agree that research funding is intended to be awarded to research initiatives that have the greatest potential to expand human knowledge, increase our understanding of the world, our society and the intersection between the two and/or have significant potential for benefit.

I am a scientist, a researcher, an accessibility and inclusion strategist, and thought leader, with a perspective rooted in lived, living and professional experience. I'm a geneticist, with expertise in genomics, experimental therapeutics, diagnostics, population data science and public health research, and have led research on the accessibility of higher education and employment, the accessibility of STEM, research and research training, and organizational and systemic cultures of accessibility and inclusion.

Today, I serve as chief operating and chief scientific officer of IDEA-STEM, an organization dedicated to inclusion and participation of persons with disabilities in STEM and health care education, research and careers.

I want to reframe the discourse on the importance of inclusion, diversity, equity and accessibility in science and research.

Imagine for a moment the life-saving medical device that isn't certified safe for use by millions of Canadians because the scientists developing it did not know enough to make a survey that was accessible to persons with disabilities. Imagine a study with potential to greatly influence policy on aging in place, yet, because of its structure, the community intended to benefit cannot participate. Imagine a harmful genetic variant in a cancer patient that goes misclassified because we do not collect essential data about the patient, or because the reference population dataset reflects the wrong ethnic or geographic segment of humanity. Imagine a study to assess the impact of COVID-19 on employment experiences, but we can't learn about disabled workers because nobody asked the disability screening question.

These are not hypothetical scenarios, nor are they rare. Over the course of my career, I have encountered each of them in some form, and all could have been avoided.

A research grant application lays out the research questions, rationale, potential for benefit, hypotheses, approaches, methods and anticipated outcomes. Thought is given to contingencies, limitations, sources of bias and potential next steps. Each component is itself a part of the research life cycle. Proposals involving human research participants are reviewed by research award panels and research ethics committees, which is a crucial step in the check and balance of identifying excellence in research and in determining which research avenues to fund.

But what if I told you that those real-life scenarios that I described passed through ethics and funding review and were approved? That tells me there were failure modes at multiple points in the research life cycle in those projects that were not identified by researchers or ethics or funding panels. Likeliest is that all parties did not know what they did not know and didn't think to ask anybody who might be able to assist, or someone raised the possibility of limitations in project scope because of these failure modes and they were voted down.

Application of inclusion, diversity, equity and accessibility principles throughout the research life cycle by way of asking rational, reflective questions about these failure modes would have avoided each of those scenarios that I described. Having diverse lived experiences, perspectives and ways of thought on the team and an environment where those voices are heard and cultivated would have done that as well. Having diverse perspectives in funding panels and ethics committees would have done that as well..

Perhaps, then, research excellence isn't just about novelty and innovation of the idea and approach. It's also about how well these approaches are executed and how much they anticipate and counter sources of bias, and about the complement of skills, characteristics and perspectives brought to the table. Perhaps asking about equity, diversity and inclusion plans in research proposals actually is not effective, because this isn't about EDI. It's about how we do the best, highest-quality and most rigorous research. Equity is central to excellence, and inclusive science is simply better science.

Therefore, we need to mandate inclusive research design in research endeavours, facilitating identification and minimization of bias, and re-engineer our research evaluation frameworks to ensure that we are adequately assessing for inclusive research design. We need to embed ethical and societal impact training and inclusive research training in our undergraduate and graduate curricula, invest in intentional pathway programs to strengthen the research ecosystem, and rigorously audit EDI initiatives to ensure that they are positioned to foster research excellence.

I emphasize again that equity and excellence are not in conflict; they are mutually reinforcing. I urge this committee to strengthen, not weaken EDI considerations in research funding criteria to ensure that Canadian science remains globally competitive, ethically grounded and socially responsible.

IDEA-STEM stands ready to work together—

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Can you please wind up? Your time is up.

[Mahadeo Sukhai]

IDEA-STEM stands ready to work together with you and the research ecosystem by contributing further evidence, lived expertise and policy guidance.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Thank you.

Now we will proceed to Mr. Christopher Dummitt, a professor of Canadian studies at Trent University. He's joining us by video conference.

Mr. Dummitt, you have five minutes. Please go ahead.

[Christopher Dummitt, Professor, Canadian Studies, Trent University, As an Individual]

Thank you very much.

I'm very honoured to be here. I was happy to be here at the committee late last November, and I'm happy to be back.

I think I'm here to speak to a survey and report I did with a data scientist, Zachary Patterson of Concordia University, last year, where we surveyed the political opinions of professors across the country and their attitudes toward academic freedom and diversity issues. We did a report based on that survey.

Our main finding was that the federal research and funding agencies are ignoring the most important and most significant diversity problem in higher education. That problem relates to viewpoint diversity. It might seem that this could be a partisan statement, but I want to emphasize that this is just an accurate description based on the data. Our survey found that when one looks at professors' voting patterns, based on the 2021 election, fully 76% of professors voted for the NDP or the Liberal Party. Only 7.6% voted for the Conservative Party. When we asked professors about their self-reported political beliefs, fully 88% identified as being on the left. This, of course, is significantly different from the wider population. I want to suggest to the committee that if this result or this skew on this kind of issue were similar for really any other metric of diversity, it would be considered a national crisis.

It might be tempting to dismiss this as an issue for only conservative scholars. While I certainly think it's true that we found lots of evidence of self-censorship on the part of scholars and concerns for their careers, I want to emphasize that we also had evidence from centrist and even progressive scholars who differed from colleagues on certain kinds of issues who also reported this as a major problem. I also want to suggest to you that the problem of the lack of viewpoint diversity in our universities damages the core mission of universities themselves. It brings the mission of Canadian universities into disrepute.

How does this work in practice? It reduces the effectiveness of peer review. Peer review depends on having the best experts analyze claims to truth and knowledge. If we are excluding a series of viewpoints from the peer review, this is a significant problem. Whether it's live policy debates on housing, addiction or crime, or whether it's just questions about Canadian history and literature, this is a major issue. I would ask committee members to think about what they would think of research that came from a population of scholars who all thought like those in, say, the Cato Institute, or a MAGA think tank like the America First Policy Institute. Would you trust that research? I would say of course you wouldn't, and nor should you.

For those in the political minority in universities, our report found pretty significant problems. There was a high rate of self-censorship—in other words, not speaking on issues, not researching on issues and avoiding issues. Almost half of conservative scholars reported that they were frightened of even having their colleagues know that they were conservative. This is obviously a major issue.

We're also talking about the problem of group polarization. In communities where people tend to all think alike, what tends to happen in those kinds of groups, whether we're talking about juries or in the university world, is that people tend to skew toward.... Even if they come in with more moderate viewpoints, the lack of those who challenge those ideas tends to have the overall opinion of the group skew towards one area in particular and become more radicalized than any individual would have been when they came in.

Finally, I think the issue is that current federal EDI policies in research and in the Canada research chairs not only don't deal with this issue but also probably make it worse. The demand for diversity statements is a classic example of a kind of systemic discrimination. It's a policy that intends to be neutral but actually embeds within it, in practice, forms of political discrimination. That's mostly because, in practice, it tends to prioritize certain versions of EDI and not others. This isn't about not allowing discrimination. It's about essentially, in practice, discriminating against colour-blind approaches to EDI.

What's more, often programs, research or otherwise, that are, say, trying to target certain kinds of identity groups get paired with much more politicized readings, which then skew the research funding program towards certain political viewpoints, eliminating others from the outset.

This is obviously a significant problem. We only have to look south of the border right now to think about the lack of—

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

I'm sorry for interrupting. If you can please wind up, your time is up.

[Christopher Dummitt]

Absolutely.

Obviously, we only have to look south of the border to see what the major problems are when higher education lacks the public trust and to see exactly where this could go.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

I'm sorry. I will have to end you here.

We will now proceed to Dr. Wendy Cukier.

Dr. Cukier, you can go ahead. You will have five minutes for your opening remarks.

[Wendy Cukier, Professor, Entrepreneurship and Strategy, Ted Rogers School of Management and Academic Director, Diversity Institute, As an Individual]

Thanks very much. It's a pleasure to be here today.

I'm a professor of entrepreneurship and strategy. I'm a former vice-president of research and innovation. I've served on a number of selection committees at various levels, and I have 30 years of experience as a researcher, peer reviewer and chair of many committees.

I really have three points today.

The first is that Canada is changing, and any research on the Canadian population has to reflect these changes. It's also worth noting that we recently did a survey with Environics of 5,000 Canadians across the country. Fifty-six per cent believe that the current focus on equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility is a good thing. Twenty-seven per cent were neutral, and only 16% thought it was a bad thing. I think we need to make sure that we're not swayed by a lot of the anti-EDI discourse that flows over the border.

My second point is that—and this really confirms what Dr. Sukhai said—excellence in research requires an equity, diversity and inclusion lens in the design and implementation of research projects or else we put Canadians' prosperity, lives and well-being at risk.

Finally, great minds don't think alike, and homogeneity often leads to groupthink. There are many ways of knowing, and different research traditions, approaches and methods are needed to produce high-quality research. We also need disciplinary and demographic diversity.

I just have a few points to elaborate on that, and I will submit a written brief after.

When I talk about shifts in the Canadian population, I mean that one-third of the workforce is now racialized and that 27% identify as having a disability. Women are now the majority of university graduates. They own 20% of businesses, are joint owners in 17% more, and their 20% of businesses contribute $90 billion to the Canadian economy and account for about a million jobs. So, if you ignore gender in economic development strategies, in entrepreneurship and in innovation, you're losing out. We also know that, obviously, indigenous people have constitutional rights, and indigenous youth are the fastest-growing segment of the population. So, Canada is changing.

From our perspective—and I'm in a business school—we focus on how equity, diversity and inclusion supports business goals and objectives. Many of you know polling, for example. If survey research is not disaggregated by gender, by region, by age and so on, it doesn't tell us what's really going on. We know with health research that not disaggregating data and bringing in a gender and diversity lens results in, for example, COVID vaccination strategies that result in very high infection rates for certain segments of the population. Some of you may be familiar with Kwame McKenzie's research that showed that, in Toronto, the Black community had nine times the infection rate of the white community. It was when they brought an equity, diversity and inclusion lens to the public health strategies that they were able to reduce that to comparable levels. That is a perfect example of where bringing an equity, diversity and inclusion lens to research resulted in saving lives.

There are a lot more examples, whether we look at genomics research or whether we look at car safety systems. For example, it became clear that women were more likely to be injured and killed because car safety research used male crash test dummies.

Fundamentally, the kinds of things that the CIHR is building into research design requirements are critical, in my view, to excellence. My Ph.D. is in information systems. When we look at artificial intelligence, we see that if you don't bring a gender and diversity lens, you embed bias and do more harm than good. There are a lot of examples that I will bring to that when I'm answering questions.

As a result, we know that diverse perspectives are critically important to research. When you are trying to engage with diverse populations, having teams that are also diverse strengthens not only the innovation and multiple perspectives but also the ability to engage with certain segments of the population.

We also know that disciplinary diversity is really important.

One of the big failures in Canada is the gap between our research excellence and our innovation. I would argue that this comes from an overemphasis on science, technology, engineering and math, and a lack of emphasis—

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

I'm sorry for interrupting. Please—

[Wendy Cukier]

—on innovation. I'm happy to talk more about it.

My conclusions are very similar to Dr. Sukhai's.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Thanks a lot.

We will proceed to Yves Gingras.

Please, go ahead. You have five minutes for your opening remarks.

[Yves Gingras, Scientific Director, Observatory of Science and Technology, Université du Québec à Montréal, As an Individual]

Thank you.

I'm here to try to provide answers to questions arising from your study on the impact of funding criteria on research excellence. I will parse two key components of that: funding criteria and research excellence.

I've worked for 40 years at the intersection—that's a buzzword—of the sociology of science, the evaluation of research and the transformation of universities. I have therefore systematically analyzed how research works. It's not how I would like it to work, but it's how it works in the real world. So, what is scientific research?

Then, if we look at the connection between funding criteria and excellence, we have to ask ourselves what the current problem is. What is the mission of the three granting agencies? As they themselves say on their websites, their mission is to fund graduate and postgraduate scholarships. They also talk about funding “world-class” “innovative” work leading to “scientific breakthroughs”. These words can be found on the websites of all three granting agencies. Another aspect is training researchers. That is their mission.

The problem we have now has been well known in the field of organizational theory since the 1960s. It is called goal displacement. We've observed that the mission of the granting agencies until the 1980s and 1990s was to subsidize researchers. Then they were told, as we just heard, that they now have another mission related to a term that's never been defined: DEI, or “diversity, equity and inclusion”. The term suggests social equality and social justice issues. That's legitimate, but it's another mission.

To better illustrate the unintended consequences of merging missions, I'll give you a very simple example. Governments are made up of a number of departments, such as a department of the environment and a department of industry. If we ask the department of industry to also function as the department of the environment, it won't be able to do anything, because it will have to somehow reconcile two contradictory missions. That's why the department of the environment does one job, and the department of industry does another. Then the government, in its wisdom, can decide to act on studies by the department of the environment, for example. However, if both missions are assigned to the same organization, it will fail. That is well known.

So people rack their brains figuring out how to incorporate DEI. What we just heard and what we've been hearing for three weeks are what I call affirmations. People say DEI is good, but they don't understand the methodology. Any academic researcher knows very well that, if the methodology is biased—if a sample does not include women, say—the results will obviously be erroneous. That wasn't invented in the 1990s. Researchers have been evaluating methodology since the first federal grants were given out and the National Research Council of Canada was created in 1916.

In short, any external funding criteria can only diminish what we call excellence. Now, what is excellence? How do we achieve excellence? It is easy to demonstrate that excellence is a tautology. I provided the committee with a document about that. Excellence is what we deem to be excellent. At the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, NSERC, 70% of the researchers have a grant and are excellent. At the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, CIHR, only 15% of the researchers have a grant and are excellent. Universities don't hire mediocre professors, so all university presidents think that their professors are excellent because they are university professors.

We have to stop conflating these things and ask ourselves what the granting agencies' mission should be. Their mission should be to subsidize university researchers who are hired by universities. If they're hired, they're probably excellent. Let's stop basing decisions on abstract things and do empirical studies. For that, we need NSERC and CIHR data on rates of success and failure, but that data is not made available to us for privacy reasons. In contrast, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, SSHRC, has given this data to a leading researcher, Julien Larregue, who will present his findings to you an hour from now.

To sum up, if there must be funding criteria, those criteria have to be based on financial need. If we want to encourage girls or indigenous people to become professors, we have to give them schools and get them to college and university. It'll take 20 years for them to become professors. There's no reason to believe that today's faculty will represent the population.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Can you please wind up?

[Yves Gingras]

Not everyone is in university. So we have to help people who are at university, but we mustn't confuse current research with what it should be in the future.

Let's get back to the concepts and what they mean.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Thanks a lot to all the witnesses. We will now start our first round of questioning with MP Baldinelli for six minutes.

Please go ahead.

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

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for being with us this morning.

I want to follow up on one comment that was made about the notion of wanting to avoid embedding bias. Mr. Dummitt, I'm going to follow up with you. You had talked about how critically important the peer review system is.

You appeared on November 28, 2024, when you mentioned that “federal funding agencies, federal research agencies and the Canada research program are at the moment ignoring the single biggest and most egregious diversity problem in higher education, and that is viewpoint diversity.” Then you went on to say, “I think the lack of viewpoint diversity significantly damages the purpose of higher education, which I greatly support.”

How can viewpoint diversity advance research excellence in Canada?

[Christopher Dummitt]

I suppose I said something similar to what the first and third witnesses said, talking about how, at the best point, peer review depends on a wide range of experts assessing the material for what it is. If you don't have a diverse viewpoint, then it's a significant problem. You're not getting an actual, complete analysis of the material.

In reality right now, that's not happening in the university sector. The Canada research chairs program and the federal funding agencies are essentially ignoring the reality that there's an incredible skew in who makes up the population of peer reviewers and university researchers. It's not even, as far as I can tell, on the radar.

Secondly, as I was saying in the second half of my comments, the current practices of EDI funding under programs are actually making the political skew much worse.

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

There was another quote from your previous testimony, and I bring it up again because, unfortunately, during that day of hearings, there were a lot of technical issues, so a lot of testimony was missed at certain periods. I wanted to follow up, because I found it quite interesting. During that time, you quoted John Stuart Mill, who said, “He who knows only his...side of the case knows...little”.

Is viewpoint diversity right now a funding criteria for the tri-councils in federal research funding that you know of?

[Christopher Dummitt]

I don't believe it is. I don't see it there. Maybe there's someone who could see it. It certainly doesn't come up as a criteria in the training materials that I've seen. It doesn't seem to be an issue when the panels are deciding who gets to assess this material, and it's not a category that is being promoted by the Canada research chairs program or federal funding agencies, despite the fact that, as our research shows, the political skew in higher education is worse than almost any other category of identity that the federal funding agencies are tracking.

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

During testimony on that day, Mr. Eric Kaufmann also appeared, and he proposed a solution. He said:

I would like to see the councils get ahead of this problem and move to a colour-blind merit approach. Remove political criteria such as mandatory diversity statements. These are not universal consensus values. They are partisan values, and every survey will show a big partisan gap on these questions.

I want to get your thoughts on that.

[Christopher Dummitt]

I'd like to emphasize that I think it's a false choice between accounting for diversity and the way it's currently being operated. Excellent research design—and here I'd agree with my fellow witnesses—must account for the diversity of the population and for different ways it will affect different parts of the population. It's a false choice between having EDI and not having EDI. Research design has to account for that, but the agencies must be aware that the way in which current policies are framed interprets, mandates and embeds a partisan interpretation of what EDI means in practice.

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

You're correct in that.

Going back to the testimony of November 28, we also heard from Dr. Jeremy Kerr, and he mentioned diversity of views or diverse backgrounds. That's not to say it's not important. He says, “when I am looking for people to include in my research group, the last thing I'm trying to do is make everybody...like me.”

That's critically important. In terms of viewpoint diversity, when we look at these projects, would you not agree?

[Christopher Dummitt]

I think it absolutely should be on the agenda. The problem is partly the pipeline. The problem is that the population of professors is so skewed already that work should be done up and down the system to make sure that there's a much wider and more representative range of Canadians who are recruited and hired as experts and as professors in the higher education system.