Tag Archives: Canada Research Chairs

Cheating White Scholars Out of Jobs & Sinking the Standards

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‘Inclus­ive’ hir­ing hampers research: report

‘Diversity … can lower per­form­ance’

Mcgill Uni­versity’s most recent equity quotas require the school to hire 34 “racial­ized” Canada Research Chairs, five Indi­gen­ous Canada Research Chairs and 10 “per­sons with dis­ab­il­it­ies.”
National Post - (Latest Edition)

TRISTIN HOPPER

2 Sep 2026

Cana­dian man­dates on race-based hir­ing quotas in aca­demia have done meas­ur­able dam­age to the coun­try’s research pro­ductiv­ity, accord­ing to a new report by the Mac­don­ald-laur­ier Insti­tute.

Ever since 2017, Cana­dian uni­versit­ies have been sub­ject to strict iden­tity-based hir­ing quotas as a con­di­tion of receiv­ing fed­eral research fund­ing.

In recent years, this has res­ul­ted in a reg­u­lar stream of aca­demic job post­ings that are expli­citly barred to straight, white men. New­found­land’s Memorial Uni­versity, for instance, advert­ised a tranche of five new jobs in April that were open only to “women; 2SLGBTQIA+ people; Indi­gen­ous peoples; racial­ized per­sons; and per­sons with dis­ab­il­it­ies.”

And accord­ing to a 54-page report pub­lished Tues­day, all of this iden­tity-based hir­ing has yiel­ded a not­able drop off in the amount of Cana­dian research being pub­lished or cited by other schol­ars.

“Our ana­lysis … con­firms that diversity is not merely neut­ral but can lower per­form­ance,” reads the con­clu­sion of The Equity-excel­lence Tradeoff report.

It added, “all told, end­ing EDI (equity, diversity and inclu­sion) ini­ti­at­ives in Cana­dian research should be a top pri­or­ity for any respons­ible gov­ern­ment.”

The report zer­oed in on the $311-mil­lion per year Canada Research Chair pro­gram, the fed­eral research fund with the most overt stric­tures on iden­tity-based hir­ing.

The pro­gram funds 2,285 uni­versity-based Canada Research Chairs whose salary and office expenses are covered entirely by fed­eral grant money. For a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair, for instance, schools receive $200,000 a year. For Tier 2, it’s $100,000 per year.

In return, schools must sub­mit to fed­er­ally set quotas on the race, gender and sexual char­ac­ter­ist­ics of the research­ers they’re allowed to hire.

Accord­ing to the most recent “equity tar­gets” pub­lished by the Gov­ern­ment of Canada, Canada Research Chairs must be 22 per cent “racial­ized,” 4.9 per cent “Indi­gen­ous” and 50.9 per cent “women and gender equity-seek­ing groups.”

These tar­gets take the form of reg­u­larly updated tables in which indi­vidual uni­versit­ies are told the pre­cise num­ber of Canada Research Chairs they’re required to hire in one of four “equity-deserving” groups.

Mcgill Uni­versity’s most recent equity quotas, for instance, require the school to hire 34 “racial­ized” Canada

Research Chairs, five Indi­gen­ous Canada Research Chairs and 10 “per­sons with dis­ab­il­it­ies.”

The Canada Research Chair pro­gram began in 2000, but its iden­tity man­dates star­ted only in 2017 under the over­sight of then-prime min­is­ter Justin Trudeau. And in just nine years, the effect has been pre­cip­it­ous.

At the pro­gram’s launch, 80 per cent of Canada Research Chairs were white males. As of 2025, white males com­prised just 25 per cent of the total.

Mac­don­ald-laur­ier Insti­tute ana­lysts ranked the pro­ductiv­ity of Canada Research Chairs both before and after the iden­tity man­dates.

What they determ­ined was that the quant­ity and qual­ity of Canada Research Chair schol­ar­ship had declined from between 10 per cent to 15 per cent, which the report attrib­uted to the “non-mer­it­ori­ous appoint­ment of less qual­i­fied Black, Indi­gen­ous, and female chairs.”

The report cat­egor­ized the per­form­ance of 1,906 Canada Research Chairs by their “h-index,” a stand­ard global meas­ure of a scholar’s pro­ductiv­ity and rel­ev­ance.

An h-index ranks the num­ber of papers in which a researcher is lis­ted as an author, as well as the num­ber of instances in which those papers have been cited by oth­ers, and then arrives at a num­ber that is typ­ic­ally between one and 100.

Cur­rently, Canada’s highest h-index belongs to Mcmas­ter Uni­versity health researcher Gor­don Guyatt. With his name on 1,715 pub­lic­a­tions and 366,582 cita­tions, as of last count, he has an h-index of 290.

In a close second is another Mcmas­ter Uni­versity health researcher, Salim Yusuf, with an h-index of 280.

The Mac­don­ald-laur­ier Insti­tute paper broke down the median h-index for dif­fer­ent races of Canada Research Chairs, and found that the cohorts with the low­est research pro­ductiv­ity are the same cohorts being given pri­or­ity for aca­demic jobs.

The aver­age white or Asian male scholar, for instance, had an h-index of 39. For male schol­ars who were Black or Indi­gen­ous, mean­while, the h-index came to 25.

There was also an h-index gap between women and men gen­er­ally. Male Canada Research Chairs aver­aged an h-index of 38, while female schol­ars aver­aged 28.

From this, the paper con­cluded that the gradual replace­ment of high-achiev­ing cohorts with lower-achiev­ing ones was com­ing at the cost of lower qual­ity research — at least in terms of h-index scores.

“There will be many cases in which female, Black, or Indi­gen­ous schol­ars will not impose a cost, but on aver­age — underan Edid­ispens­a­tion in which race and sex con­sid­er­a­tions can out­weigh schol­arly merit — this will be the case,” it said.

As one example, the paper noted that in instances where a uni­versity took a pos­i­tion pre­vi­ously filled by a white or Asian scholar, and filled it with a Black or Indi­gen­ous hire, that’s likely to entail an “aver­age loss of 3.2 h-index points.”

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Prominent Scientists Warn

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Diversity mandates are killing Canadian science: Heterosexual White Males Given only 19% of $300-Million In Fed Funded Research Money

Diversity mandates are killing Canadian science

  • National Post
  • 20 Sep 2025
  • TRISTIN HOPPER
Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker says allocating funding to scientists based on race or sex works against the interest of science and that universities need to drop their “obsession” with enforcing ethnic diversity.

Diversity mandates as practised by Canada are eroding basic science and discrediting the academic system, the renowned Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker warned in recent testimony to a House of Commons research committee.

“Allocating funding to scientists based on their race or sex works against the interest of science and the nation,” Pinker told a meeting of the Standing Committee on Science and Research this week.

Rather, said Pinker, universities need to drop their “obsession” with enforcing ethnic diversity and focus instead on cultivating “viewpoint diversity.”

“As the joke went, in a university, diversity means people who look different but think alike,” he said.

Born and educated in Montreal, Pinker ranks as one of the world’s most wellknown Canadian academics. His books can regularly be seen atop The New York Times bestseller list, and his 2002 work The Blank Slate was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Pinker’s testimony was mostly a broad critique of diversity quotas, which he said had their origins in the 1970s in the United States. Nevertheless, in recent years it has indeed become standard practice for Canadian universities to ascribe racebased quotas to everything from admissions to hiring to grant funding.

In a February report, the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy found that it was a near-universal practice of Canadian universities to either screen for candidates based on race or sexuality, or to require them to file “diversity statements” expressing adherence to campus “anti-racism” policies.

Multiple Canadian universities have also begun setting aside program seats for members of a specific race. Toronto Metropolitan University, for one, opened its medical school last year with a requirement that 75 per cent of all admissions go to Black, Indigenous and other “equity-deserving” applicants.

Pinker told the committee that his own Harvard students, when faced with mandatory diversity statements to obtain a research position, have sometimes filled them out using the AI program CHATGPT.

Said Pinker, “they could not honestly fill them out; it would go against their conscience to say things that they knew were not true, but they knew they would be blackballed and eliminated from a job if they expressed their true opinions.”

In Canada, many of these identity-based policies have been driven by federal order. The more than $300 million in annual funding for Canada Research Chairs, for instance, requires universities to meet strict hiring quotas on race, sex and ability: 50.9 per cent of funds must go to women, 22 per cent to “visible minorities” and 7.5 per cent to “persons with disabilities.”

Pinker told the Commons committee that it’s not reasonable to expect that every single branch of science is going to have an ethnic makeup that’s exactly proportional to the general population.

“It leads to rather monstrous consequences like saying ‘there are too many Asians on this committee,’ or too many Asians are getting funding, or too many Jews, or too many Sikhs, or too many Arabs,” he said.

Pinker said that under the guise of “looking” diverse, universities have increasingly become subject to chilling “monocultures” that shun and punish dissenting opinions.

“As a cognitive scientist, I can attest that the human mind is vulnerable to many biases and fallacies. The strongest is the ‘my side’ bias, the conviction that my tribe or coalition or party is

POLITICIZATION IN SCIENCE, IT’S LIKE BACTERIA IN AN OPERATING ROOM.

correct and that a rival coalition is ignorant or evil or both,” said Pinker.

Pinker said the usual way around this is to maintain an intellectual culture in which biases can be freely attacked and criticized by colleagues who think differently. “One person can point out another’s errors and the whole community can be more rational than any of the individuals in it,” he said.

Pinker has previously described his political alignment as “liberal Democrat” and once told a writer for the Harvard Crimson that a framed candid photo of him meeting then prime minister Justin Trudeau was “one of my proudest possessions.”

Nevertheless, in recent years Pinker has become an outspoken critic of a “social justice monoculture” at North American universities.

He’s a co-founder of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, a group pledged to endorse free speech and viewpoint diversity at the Ivy League school.

When multiple Harvard campus organizations openly endorsed Palestinian terrorism in the immediate wake of the October 7 massacres, Pinker published a five-point plan in the Boston Globe on how to “save Harvard from itself.”

Among Pinker’s points was a call for the university to “disempower” DEI. “Universities should stanch the flood of DEI officials, expose their policies to the light of day, and repeal the ones that cannot be publicly justified,” he wrote.

Also testifying at Monday’s committee was Azim Shariff, a UBC psychology professor whose research has touched on how institutional politicization affects public trust.

In a 2024 study, Shariff’s team found that even when an institution (such as the Catholic Church, police or Major League Baseball) had politics that aligned with a person’s own leanings, it still caused that person to lose trust in the institution.

“We found that the perceived politicization of institutions — the extent to which institutions were perceived as allowing their political values to impact their work — was associated with lower trust toward those institutions as well as lower willingness to support and defer to their expertise,” it read.

Shariff told Parliamentarians that “Canada, unfortunately, has a reputation for having a somewhat politicized academy.”

“Politicization in science, it’s like bacteria in an operating room,” he said. “There’s no way you’ll be able to get rid of it entirely, but you do want to do as much as you can to remove it, and I don’t think you should trust any surgeon who’s not trying to do that.”

Article Name:Diversity mandates are killing Canadian science

(National Post, September 20, 2025)

Author:TRISTIN HOPPER

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