Science and Research

The committee is studying the impact of federal funding criteria on research excellence in Canada. Appearing were Gita Ljubicic, professor at McMaster University; Steven Pinker, professor at Harvard University; Azim Shariff, professor at the University of British Columbia; Kelly Cobey, scientist at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute; Grace Karram, assistant professor at the University of Toronto; and Vincent Larivière, professor at the Université de Montréal.

Gita Ljubicic said conventional quantitative measures of excellence, such as publication counts, do not capture real-world impacts like informing policy or advancing reconciliation. She recommended ensuring reviewers have direct cultural or community-specific experience, including early career researchers as reviewers for their own funding pools, and assessing partnerships based on relationship strength and collective planning rather than just academic outputs.

Steven Pinker argued that viewpoint diversity is essential to science because it helps correct cognitive biases, while allocating funding based on race or sex is inherently unfair, wastes taxpayer money, and undermines public trust. He said that if science is perceived as ideological, the public may reject even strong scientific consensus, and that interventions to address inequities should occur earlier in the education pipeline, not at the grant-awarding stage.

Azim Shariff said the Canada Research Chair program’s policy of restricting new nominations when an institution trails behind equity targets for any one group can be counterproductive, as it incentivizes hiring from larger pools while still missing targets for smaller groups. He gave an example of a failed search for a senior scholar that left a research cluster in jeopardy, and urged Canada to reconsider such trade-offs to better attract talent fleeing the politicized U.S. academic environment.

Kelly Cobey said Canada is shifting from quantitative metrics like journal impact factors toward qualitative assessments, such as the tri-agencies’ new narrative CVs and CIHR’s eight-domain research excellence framework. She warned of implementation gaps between policy and practice, and called for better monitoring of funded projects, noting that about half of clinical trials conducted in Canada never have their results reported.

Grace Karram highlighted several paradoxes: Canada’s R&D spending as a share of GDP is below the OECD average, yet higher education research spending has risen; Canada ranks high in publications but low in patents. She recommended funding both institutional infrastructure and projects, expanding who qualifies as a researcher to include precarious faculty, increasing international collaboration, and using targeted programming to support women, racialized researchers, and Indigenous communities.

Vincent Larivière said there is no consensus on what research excellence is, and that evaluation committees often rely on flawed quantitative indicators like publication volume and citation counts. He recommended that funding agencies experiment with peer review, that narrative CVs be kept short to avoid being judged by volume, and that the use of bibliometric indicators in evaluation committees be explicitly banned.

During questions, members asked about DEI policies, the concentration of funding at large universities, and the role of knowledge mobilization. Witnesses disagreed on some points: Pinker and Shariff argued that demographic diversity criteria can exclude talent and chill research, while Karram countered that well-designed EDI programs can bring in highly skilled researchers from diverse backgrounds and improve research questions. There was no procedural debate, motions, or votes during this meeting.