The reference was to the Canada Excellence Research Chairs program of the tri-councils. It was its inaugural round of selection—all men.
There was an ad hoc group commissioned by the minister to look at the situation and develop recommendations essentially for the universities, because they would do the recruitment, they're the ones going out and doing the head- hunting. It asked them what we could do to change the way the program functions, not to change the bar of excellence, but to change the way we actually do the intake in terms of just how long you have to be up in the process before you know whether you're going to actually be taken forward. The uncertainty about that, from a family and planning and obligation point of view, is something that not everybody is equally prepared to accept. So what we were trying to do was redesign the process to give more certainty in the front end to applicants that their application would be pursued further at a later stage.
I don't do the adjudication. This was still done by peer review. This is still done by an international panel of the best experts. We were choosing the best to come to Canada.
But it's really an excuse to say, “Well, the people we chose to meet a certain bar all end up being men”, and then be indifferent. The question is, what could you do to encourage and facilitate, in different circumstances, diverse groups of people to be able to come forward and to participate in the process? When you take those measures, you intentionally take steps to do that, lo and behold the outcome changes, not the quality of the people, but the outcome, which I think is really what we were getting at.