There's no question that it turns it into an ideological imposition. In English, it's called a mandated speech. This goes against the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and freedom of conscience. The proof is that, in the United States, on the subject of diversity statements, a researcher went to court, and the universities stopped demanding them. If I submit a research project on the history of science, no one can ask me if I'm for the poor and against the rich; that's irrational. It's a question of whether my project is of good quality, and there should be a prohibition on requiring that kind of reporting. Someone has to go to a superior court one day to tell the government that declarations on diversity are absurd.
Having sat on selection committees, I can tell you that, in some Canada Research Chair applications, the declaration on diversity is longer than the research project itself. As an evaluator, I threw it in the garbage. I was thinking, “I'm subsidizing research, not somebody who wants to change the world.” It's the government's responsibility to make sure that poor people… We're talking about diversity, but we're not talking about social classes. However, it's people in lower social classes who don't go to university. It's not because of the colour of their skin, but because of their relative wealth.
In short, it is indeed an ideological imposition based on ignorance of what scientific research is. It should be evaluated based on the quality of the project and in double blindness, that is to say without knowing who produced the project. When I evaluate scientific publications in Nature, it's double blind. I don't know if the article is written by a man or a woman. I assess it and then I tell them, for example, that it's a very good article and that they should publish it.