First and foremost, the creeping integration of more EDI activist requirements into large-scale grants is an issue. If we want to fund the best research, we should fund the best research. We shouldn't fund the best research that also makes vague commitments to activist EDI or base research funding for things like hard science and engineering projects on the basis of those statements.
Again, I'm seeing this less in NSERC, more in SSHRC and surprisingly more in CIHR than I expected in terms of its guidelines. We're carving out research dollars for explicitly activist projects in the social sciences and humanities in particular, so we're not only saying that we encourage researchers to build their research proposals in such a way that makes a nod to equity, diversity and inclusion, but it's more likely to be funded if it's equity, diversity and inclusion. We're taking scarce taxpayer dollars and saying that these grants are only for activist projects.
If you look at the language in things like the knowledge synthesis grants at SSHRC and the race, gender and diversity initiative, which has ended, that was quite a large sum of money and a lot of $450,000 grants. That's what I found overwhelmingly within those grants. The percentages I found of activist projects within the SSHRC main insight grants was between 10% and 15% with explicitly activist language in their titles. That's a lot higher than I think should be coming from a federal granting agency, but it's not 100%. With those more explicitly activist grants, it was more like two-thirds in terms of that.
I think, first and foremost, we pare down the guidelines, we maintain a commitment to ideological and political neutrality, and we say that we're going to stop carving out scarce taxpayer resources for grants that are about activism. If the government wants to fund activism, it can fund activism. It shouldn't be doing it through its research granting agencies.