Science and Research Committee on Sept. 22nd, 2025

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

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for being with us today.

Mr. Horsman, you authored a chapter in the book The War on Science. Within that chapter, you wrote, "We need to re-normalize a culture of liberal science on campus, especially with respect to radical new ideas, like equity, diversity, and inclusion." In the same chapter, you also wrote, "Universities, the institutions that should be at the very heart of liberal science, are increasingly ignoring these rules."

In your testimony today, you talked about two of your recommendations for how we can depoliticize science funding and entrench a culture of free speech. I think that touches upon diversity viewpoints. Can you elaborate a little more on that?

[Geoff Horsman]

With respect to one of the problems with renormalizing a culture of free exchange of ideas, I was referring to Jonathan Rauch's rules for liberal science. The first rule is that knowledge is provisional; no one has the final say. That's very important.

In his first book, he uses an example of estimates of the size of the universe and how those have changed year by year and century after century. At any time, can you be sure you have the right answer? Of course not. Everything is open, everything is contestable. Nothing is beyond question or debate.

As I mentioned, that rule is being broken, because people will say that a given controversial topic is beyond debate.

The other rule is that no one has personal authority. No one can use their personal or identity status to wall off knowledge from other people. It's universal. That means, as I mentioned in my testimony today, if you do an experiment right, it should be replicable by someone who speaks a different language on a different continent centuries in the future. That too is being attacked in the academy through things like the requirement to acknowledge lived experience of a particular person or group. It's inaccessible to others. That's a defined universal principle of knowledge and of science. You'll also hear about things like an ethnic way of knowing. That, again, is a defined universal principle; knowledge is accessible to everyone regardless of identity. It exists in the ether and it's universal.

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

In your opening statement, you mentioned a colleague telling you that you should stop talking about EDI. People had been talking and they were worried about what you were thinking. You mentioned one quote and you said that fear leads to censorship.

Within your chapter in the book, you said a scientist at another Canadian university told you, "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."

In a sense, you're almost having a bit of academic dishonesty simply to avoid that notion of censorship to get the funding. I don't think that serves the institution well.

[Geoff Horsman]

It doesn't serve anyone well. If we are now admitting openly, or in private at least, that many of us are just saying what we know needs to be said even if it deeply offends our cherished beliefs and values of things like openness and the universality of knowledge, people are saying, "I'm going to just say things that counter that in order to get funding so I can continue my research program." This is very dangerous.

We have to acknowledge what that might do to an individual person who accepts that they've lied. It diminishes their soul, in a way. They're now weaker and less able to stand up and resist further incursions. When you start lying, when do you stop?

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

To your point, when you are honest and do applications....

Dr. Kambhampati, in that chapter of the book, you mentioned having a grant application rejected because you talked about meritocratic principles in hiring. Could you expand on that, Doctor?

[Patanjali Kambhampati]

It would be my pleasure.

An NFRF competition in 2019 was the first time I had to write a DEI section. The concept of people not having all of the same resources, or even experiencing racism and sexism, is not only not distant to me, but I've experienced all of these things ad nauseam. However, that means I don't want that idea to propagate in any way, shape or form.

I'm not going to judge a woman, a man, a gay person, a Black person or a straight person by anything other than whether or not they can do quantum mechanics. I said, “Great. I welcome everyone into my group. All you have to do is be geeky enough to want to do the quantum mechanics and build lasers.” I have five women in my group of 15 men, and they're all geeky women physicists. They're just like the geeky men. We're all the same.

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

What happened? That application was rejected.

[Patanjali Kambhampati]

The application never made it to scientific review because it was rejected purely on EDI grounds. I simply said, “I've probably experienced more than you have.” Having said that, it's why I believe in merit, fairness and equality.

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

Bravo. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Thank you. Your time is up.

We will now proceed to MP Rana for six minutes.

Please, go ahead.

[Aslam Rana, Liberal, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you very much to all of the participants.

My question is for you, Dr. Horsman. I would love to mention your recent article, “Woke Hermit Kingdom: Canada Doubles Down on DEI”, which you also mentioned. You argue that many EDI practices are ineffective or even harmful, but do you explore under what conditions or designs EDI has succeeded?

[Geoff Horsman]

I think I need to explain something here. It's important to talk about what's called the motte-and-bailey tactic. With respect to EDI, we see a lot of this.

As I've experienced and demonstrated today, EDI generally involves sweeping programs of racial discrimination, compelled speech and censorship, but when people start to complain about it and it comes under fire, the EDI advocates retreat to positions like, “Well, it's just about making sure that we have good experimental design so that seat belts are designed accounting for women.” That has nothing to do with EDI. That has long been good experimental practice, and that's why you have to have lots of rigour, review and contestation of different ideas. It's so that you can seek out and find error and remove it.

I don't know of any cases where EDI has been beneficial.

[Aslam Rana, Liberal, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Over these past two committee meetings, we have heard from various professionals and scholars about how beneficial EDI has been to ensuring that all Canadians are on a fair playing field. Throughout your time in academia, what possible negative consequences of EDI have you witnessed?

[Geoff Horsman]

Negative consequences of EDI have been legion. I expressed some of them just then, but I can provide more.

For example, my department was awarded what's called an inclusive excellence program. Now, this is an Orwellian term that just means we're going to restrict it to certain limited groups. It's not including, it's excluding, and you're severely limiting the applicant pool.

Here's what happened. Our university decided, in the wake of 2021, that it wanted to hire six Black scholars and six indigenous scholars. Our department was awarded one of the positions for an indigenous scholar. Upon hearing this, a colleague of mine from outside the department related to me that they knew of a really good post-doc in the United States who is Black, and it would be really good to get this person to apply. Of course, I had to tell my colleague that this person was excluded because they have the wrong skin colour.

This is the in-and-out, daily experience of EDI policies. They are discriminatory and exclusionary, and I see no good in them. They're dark.

[Aslam Rana, Liberal, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you.

Mr. Larregue, have you noticed significant differences in how research funding applications are evaluated across disciplines?

[Julien Larregue]

Yes. Grant applications are evaluated very differently depending on the discipline. That's why I insisted that changing the criteria at the funding agency level, whether at SSHRC or NSERC, wouldn't have much impact. The committees have sovereignty over how they apply the evaluation criteria.

I'll give you a concrete example: In economics, what matters for getting a grant is that you've published articles in certain journals that are considered prestigious. If you haven't done so, your chances of getting a grant are extremely slim. However, that isn't the case when it comes to history. There isn't one specific history journal that you have to have published in or else you have lower chances of getting a grant. The definition of what constitutes quality work varies depending on the discipline.

I would add that obviously not everyone has the same opportunities to publish in certain prestigious journals, because that's very much linked to people's contact networks, in particular.

That's why I propose keeping the authors of evaluated projects anonymous at first, so the content of their project is being evaluated, and not their CV or their past grants.

[Aslam Rana, Liberal, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you.

What do you think drives these variations?

[Julien Larregue]

These differences are linked to the disciplines' history and the ways that quality and excellence are defined from one academic space to another. It's hard to attribute the differences to specific factors, because the disparity in practices means that each discipline defines what's important to that discipline. That's the case not only for awarding grants, but also for hiring professors. There are obviously still some disagreements within the disciplines themselves, but there's often an overall consensus that emerges about what makes a good CV.

I'd have to go through the history of every discipline to provide a complete answer to the question, but we don't have the time. However, for example, the way that quality is defined in economics is very much tied to American dominance. The good journals are often American journals, and if you haven't published in those journals, people think it's because your research isn't good enough. There are a whole host of factors and dynamics that make it so that different things are assessed and valued from one discipline to the next.

[Aslam Rana, Liberal, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

I'll proceed to MP Blanchette-Joncas for six minutes.

Please go ahead.

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

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I'd like to welcome the witnesses who are with us for the second hour of study.

Professor Larregue, your analysis of 56,000 applications to SSHRC shows that the University of Toronto, McGill University and the University of British Columbia have a 44% success rate, compared with 32% for universities outside the U15 group.

Doesn't that prove that the excellence criteria mainly reward institutional prestige rather than a project's scientific value and that they maintain a cyclical system?

[Julien Larregue]

Thank you for your question.

It's a bit complicated, because obviously the people at the University of Toronto and McGill University who receive those grants will tell you that they're excellent, and that that's why they receive more grants than the people at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières. However, since the current application evaluation process doesn't divorce CV evaluation and the prestige factor from project evaluations, it's quite difficult to know the causes of those people having more grants.

It's quite unlikely that it's their excellence per se that causes those differences, because if that were the case, that would be expected to be the case across all disciplines. As I said, the prestige element is decisive in some disciplines, but not in others. Unless the people at the University of Toronto are great at economics but horribly bad at history, the most likely explanation is that prestige plays a role in certain disciplines because of their specific history and their particular evaluation criteria. That's why there's a concentration of funding.

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

You found that researchers at three universities—McGill, Toronto and British Columbia—received an average of $20,000 more per grant than researchers at universities that aren't part of the U15 group.

Doesn't that create a snowball effect that artificially reinforces the prestige of major universities and disadvantages young researchers who don't work at those major universities, and who are therefore at a systemic disadvantage from the start of their career?

[Julien Larregue]

While that certainly creates cumulative disadvantages and advantages respectively, the amounts issue is quite peculiar because the applicants are the ones asking for a given amount. The most credible hypothesis is that people at the big universities believe they are excellent, so they tend to ask for more money for their research projects. That's a rather negative effect of the system: People in smaller universities ask for less money on average, so they're given less money as a result.

Again, there would be standardization measures that would be fairly easy to put in place to prevent that.

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

If resources are concentrated at three major universities—McGill, Toronto and British Columbia—aren't regional and francophone universities being deprived of their ability to fulfill their local mission, to the benefit of the major anglophone universities that focus mainly on international prestige?