Citation Needed: Anti-Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Rhetoric from the Standing Committee on Science and Research

Sara Wilmshurst

The recent report from the House of Commons Standing Committee on Science and Research (SRSR), “Impact of the Criteria for Awarding Federal Funding on Research Excellence in Canada,” delivers the Standing Committee’s recommendations for how postsecondary institutions and the Tri-Agency research funding bodies can support research excellence in Canada across all disciplines. As with all parliamentary committee reports, it includes a precis of the evidence gathered and notes where the full briefs and testimonials cited can be found online. The report was only presented to Parliament on September 21 and, at the time of writing, the government has not yet responded. It remains to be seen how this report will impact Tri-Agency policy.

The report is already worth discussing and critiquing, though, because it illustrates that Canada is not insulated from inflammatory and misleading rhetoric targeting equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) measures. The Trump White House has launched noisy and efficacious attacks on EDI in post-secondary education (and many other sectors of public life). Many Canadian academics are worried about our colleagues in the US but, as the SRSR report indicates, the call is also coming from inside the house. It is especially disappointing to see the committee bow to culture war pressures rather than weighing the quality of evidence.

The committee operated under a standing order that required them to hold at least four meetings on the topic before reporting to the House of Commons. The committee ultimately discussed the topic in six meetings across two sessions of Parliament, heard from 32 witnesses, and received 27 briefs. This is not a remarkable amount of evidence for the SRSR members and staff to synthesize into a report.[1]

However, the report is notable in that the committee did not strike a consensus. The Conservative party’s commentary at the end of the report explained “[r]eaders should be aware that it is unusual for parliamentary committee reports to contain contradictions like this in the published recommendations. However, these contradictions exist because the committee adopted the report as it was drafted, mutually agreeing to disagree on these contradicting recommendations.” Though House of Commons Committees are required to issue public reports, I cannot locate a strict timeline they must adhere to. The report’s release in this form suggests the committee was deadlocked and saw no way to an accord.

The recommendations include many commendable points intended to support research at smaller institutions and polytechnics, ensure French-language scholarship is equitably funded, and encourage more scholars to serve on agency peer-review panels. However, there are also areas of concern.  Recommendation 13 reads: “That the granting agencies—the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research—remove all references to equity, diversity and inclusion [EDI] in the process for awarding federal funding in support of research.” Several following recommendations expand on this anti-EDI position. These recommended measures would be a major departure from existing Tri-Agency policy.

At the same time, recommendations 18-20 directly contradict 13-17, encouraging the Tri-Agencies to “introduce compulsory training on equity, diversity and inclusion principles and on the ethical and societal impact of research for all funding program applicants”, “require the incorporation of equity, diversity and inclusion principles into the design of research projects,” and “create incentives for inclusive research teams and establish dedicated funding sources and incentives for projects that demonstrate fair and equitable hiring practices, whose management teams are diverse and feature collaborations with historically excluded communities.” These conflicting recommendations created an unusual situation where committee members from the Liberal Party dissented to the report to support EDI, while committee members of the Conservative Party dissented to the report to condemn EDI.

“Agreeing to disagree,” as the Conservative dissent described it, might suggest the committee placed equal weight on the pro- and anti-EDI arguments, but in fact, the report is heavily skewed toward the anti-EDI perspective. The section on “Critiques of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Measures” spans pages 30 to 42, citing seven briefs and evidence from sixteen witnesses (some of whom testified twice), while the “Defense of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Measures” goes from page 42 to 49, citing twelve briefs and evidence from fifteen witnesses.

I fully admit that I am strongly in favour of equity, diversity, and inclusion measures in the context of universities as well as more broadly. I see EDI as a reparative process that also creates a more functional society. To paraphrase from Margaret Killjoy, the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice, but only because we push on it.[2] It is therefore important to examine some of the assumptions that underpin the testimony and committee process, which the Parliamentary Committee failed to reckon with, rendering the report unsatisfying and its recommendations undeliverable.

The committee (chaired by Liberal member Salma Zahid and vice-chaired by Tony Baldinelli of the Conservative Party and Maxime Blanchette-Joncas of the Bloc Québécois, with six Liberal MPs and three Conservative MPs acting as committee members and 19 BQ MPs and three Liberal MPs as associate members) quoted from a brief from Mikko Packalen, which stated no witness or member of the Parliamentary Committee had provided good evidence to show “EDI practices benefit either scientific progress or student outcomes.” That may be so. However, the committee report did not discuss any review of the literature to determine whether such evidence exists outside the committee room.[3] In at least one meeting, committee member Taleeb Noormohamed discussed research on the impact of racialized names in hiring to question a witness’s contention that EDI policies had resulted in unqualified and underperforming hires.[4] The committee was clearly aware of the relevant literature but did not include it in the report.

The report reveals but does not analyse several anti-EDI worldviews that invite obvious critique. For example, several witnesses argued that Tri-Agency EDI policies “do not address the conditions that cause these inequities in the first place.” Witness Stephen Pinker argued “the awarding of grants takes place at the end of the science training pipeline, far too late in a person’s life to rectify social and historical inequities.” This is an important point. However, it is unreasonable to say the Tri-Agencies should either fix the root causes of oppression or do nothing at all. Rather, if all institutions and people do what is in their power to advance justice, we may accomplish something.

Witnesses also argued that, due to historic inequalities, the present stable of qualified candidates for senior academic positions necessarily underrepresents equity seeking groups. As witness Yves Gingras said, “[i]f we want to encourage girls or [I]ndigenous people to become professors, we have to give them schools and get them to college and university. It’ll take 20 years for them to become professors. There’s no reason to believe that today’s faculty will represent the population.” Other witnesses called equity targets for programs like Canada Research Chairs “abrupt.”

It is quite rational to say that the current population of senior academics reflects those able to seek higher education 20+ years ago. However, how can we expect women, Indigenous people, and other historically marginalized groups to carve out successful careers in academia en masse without mentors who understand their situations, role models who they can follow, or a clear date when they will cease to be “abrupt”?

It was notable that the report cited two anti-EDI witnesses who did argue that quality research needs to include diverse participant populations, both pointing to women’s inclusion in experimental design. Importantly, the Tri-Council guidelines for ethical human research exist in part to address the harms caused when marginalized people are represented among research subjects but not as researchers. As the literature shows, if we do not take a proactive approach to addressing this situation, then we continue this distinctive risk to research participants. Conversely, partnership with minority communities can improve their participation in research initiatives, and racial concordance between researchers and prospective study participants is correlated with greater willingness to enroll in research studies.

The report section defending EDI measures ably illustrated how “EDI is a condition for research excellence.” Notably, the witnesses and briefs[5] (if not the committee report itself) pointed to research that demonstrates the importance of diversity in health sciences and increased novelty, productivity, and impact in diverse research teams. Reading the pro-EDI section, indeed, highlights just how little the anti-EDI section gestured to research findings, despite witnesses’ repeated protestation that EDI is not evidence-based.

The report’s division into two unequal “chunks,” the first anti-EDI and the second pro-EDI, means that the two positions are rarely in conversation with one another, leaving each perspective to seem unchallenged within its own chapter. As such, the report’s entire structure and content reinforce the confusing contradictions in the final recommendations rather than providing analysis or clarity.

 “The Committee’s Observations,” enumerated before a repeated list of committee recommendations, are entirely focused on the “overwhelming testimony criticizing federal EDI policies”:

EDI is a discriminatory policy that is embraced and politicized by the far-left political agenda. It has become accepted, concentrated, and deeply entrenched in Canadian federal institutions and academia, despite being unpopular with the Canadian population at large. EDI policies are weakening the quality of Canadian research, Canada’s research reputation, and its overall research ecosystem by politicizing science, fostering cancel culture, empowering activist research, adding administrative burden to researchers, imposing mandatory diversity statements, pushing top research talent away, and limiting viewpoint diversity. Fundamentally, EDI policies are delivering bad value for Canadian taxpayers by weakening research excellence in Canada and undermining public trust and confidence in federally funded research. Scientific excellence is measured not through an accumulation of criteria, but through the ability of a system to support rigour, a diversity of approaches and intellectual freedom throughout the country.

This represents the pro-EDI entries on the “Recommendations” list as if they have no evidentiary support. While the quantity of anti-EDI witness testimony may have been “overwhelming” (which the committee’s own report does not indicate, based on the balance of citations) the quality was underwhelming indeed, amounting to a lot of culture war posturing. If there was substantive, evidence-based argumentation in the briefs and testimony, the committee failed to incorporate it into the report. The committee’s contradictory recommendations and clumsy lines of reasoning mean we, as taxpayers and, perhaps, Tri-Agency dependents, are left with a road map to nowhere.

What we can do is keep watch on this and other Parliamentary Standing Committees, monitor the testimony and documents presented in our areas of interest, and submit briefs when we see the conversation straying from evidence-based inferences. Though, as I’ve discussed above, we cannot force the SRSR to draw specific conclusions, we can make the evidence “overwhelming”.

Sara Wilmshurst is a PhD candidate at the University of Guelph and a member of the Active History editorial collective.

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[1] Recent investigations on similar topics include Distribution of Federal Funding Among Canada’s Post-Secondary Institutions (50 briefs, 35 witnesses, 10 meetings), Successes, Challenges and Opportunities for Science in Canada (16 briefs, 46 witnesses, 8 meetings), and Top Talent, Research and Innovation (11 briefs, 42 witnesses, 6 meetings).

[2] Regretfully I cannot point you to the exact podcast episode where she said this.

[3] For example, there is an academic journal titled Equality, Diversity and Inclusion that would be a clear starting point. The committee also could have reviewed the heavily-cited papers “The Diversity-Innovation Paradox In Science,” and “Gender-diverse teams produce more novel and higher-impact scientific ideas,” both referenced in committee briefs.

[4] It appears to be this study, The witness was unable to offer a specific example but expressed that it was a statistical probability.

[5] I have linked to a selection of open-access research cited in briefs from Dr. Imogen R. Coe, IDEA-STEM Consulting, and Partnership for Women’s Health Research Canada. See the briefs for their full resource lists and note that some of the material they cited is behind paywalls.