Many thanks for the invitation to participate in this important discussion.
Meritocracy is the sole operative ethos when judging research excellence. Scientific quests have a singular goal: to better understand the world and its wondrous mysteries. Science is not an empathy party meant to elevate and celebrate so-called marginalized groups. The use of diversity, inclusion and equity when allocating research funds is an affront to individual dignity and to research excellence.
A 2025 report by the Aristotle Foundation found that 97.5% of academic job postings at Canadian universities referenced diversity, inclusion and equity.
I will discuss briefly three such examples from my chapter in The War on Science.
The first example is that the University of Waterloo's School of Computer Science recently advertised for two open NSERC tier one Canada research chairs. I will quote their call. “Position 1, all areas of artificial intelligence. The call is open only to qualified individuals who self-identify as women, transgender, gender-fluid, non-binary, or Two-spirit.”
“Position 2, all areas of computer science. The call is open only to qualified individuals who self-identify as a member of a racialized minority.”
The second example, from the University of British Columbia, is for a tier one Canada research chair in oral cancer research. It reads, “the selection will be restricted to members of the following federally designated groups: people with disabilities, Indigenous people, racialized people, women, and people from minoritized gender identity groups.”
The third example, from my own university, Concordia University, is that researchers there obtained a grant from the new frontiers in research fund to decolonize light. On their website, they explain, “The Decolonizing Light project explores ways and approaches to decolonize science, such as revitalizing and restoring Indigenous knowledges, and capacity building.”
The “Decolonizing Light” project is congruent with the five-year strategic plan of Concordia to decolonize and to indigenize the entire curriculum and pedagogy. Apparently, science has suffered for too long from a whiteness problem.
Canadian medicine has also succumbed to this parasitized ideological capture, as I discuss in my forthcoming book, Suicidal Empathy. The anti-racism expert working group of CanMEDS, which develops evolving training codes for physicians and surgeons in Canada, concluded, “A new model of CanMEDS would seek to centre values such as anti-oppression, anti-racism, and social justice, rather than medical expertise.”
If you suffer from an aggressive cancer, it might be comforting to know that your oncologist is trained to “combat the historical and ongoing structures of racism, white supremacy, settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, classism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and more.”
I will end by quoting from my book, The Parasitic Mind:
[S]cience is, or should be, an apolitical process. Scientific truths and natural laws exist independent of researchers’ identities. The distribution of prime numbers does not change as a function of whether the mathematician is a white heterosexual Christian man or a transgendered, Muslim,...(obese) individual. The periodic table of elements is not dependent on whether a chemist is a Latinx queer or a cisnormative Hasidic Jew. Oh, you are a non-binary bisexual chemist? Well this completely changes the atomic numbers of Carbon, Palladium, and Uranium.
Ideological activism is anathema to research excellence. Meritocracy is all that matters.
Thank you.