That is a wonderful question.
I'm thrilled you asked that, because there's often a misconception that you fund science like you fund education, and it makes people happy and nice and other good things, and everyone feels nice about themselves like in kindergarten, but no.
Science is the driver of economic progress, first and foremost. That's absolutely true. There is no economic progress without science. Otherwise, we're just digging for gold or coal. That's why we can have quantum computers. That's why we have encryption. That's why we have MRI machines. It's because of science.
If we stop this progress by giving resources to people who are less qualified, it is absolutely necessarily the case that when you use DEI, you are discriminating. You're discriminating and following in the footsteps of intellectual racism from Britain in the 1880s, which was actually very popular in anthropology. Perhaps my colleague would know. You could get tenure in racism. It was a thing. “I just got tenure in racism; woo.” Now we have, “I just got tenure in DEI.” It's the same thing.
It's like in communism, where they politicize science to such an extent that the Ukrainians starved and cannibalized each other because they didn't believe in capitalist genetics.
The opportunity cost is astronomical. Canada was a leader. One of my heroes here is Dwayne Miller at the University of Toronto. He was a leader. He's of retirement age, almost. He'll be angry if I say that. I want to follow in his footsteps. He was my inspiration. Do I care that he's from India or China? He's actually from Manitoba, but, you know, that's fine.