At Canadian Universities, Race and Gender Quotas Have Become a Way of Life

On March 21st, the University of Waterloo—a Canadian public research university renowned for its STEM programs—published an unusual job posting for a professor in the Faculty of the Environment. “This opportunity is open only to individuals who self-identify as women, transgender, non-binary, or two-spirit,” read the announcement. The rationale? “Improving the representation, participation and engagement of equity-deserving groups within our community is a key objective of Waterloo’s Strategic Plan.”

A worthy goal, one might suppose. But you’d be excused for being unsettled by the way the university was pursuing it. Perhaps you’re surprised by the unusual specificity of the listed groups (including “two-spirit,” a term that recently has become popularized in Canadian academic and government circles to signify Indigenous people whose identity “predate[s] colonial impositions, expectations, and assumptions of sex, gender, and sexual orientation”). Or perhaps you simply thought such explicitly discriminatory hiring was illegal.

And so it is—in the United States. But in Canada, where such practices are protected under the nation’s constitution, they’ve increasingly become mandated by governments, human rights commissions, and major funding bodies. Academic institutions such as the University of Waterloo not only tend to enthusiastically comply with these affirmative-action mandates, but also top up the officially prescribed requirements with their own initiatives.

At Canadian universities (virtually all of which are public, state-funded bodies), the most prestigious positions are Canada Research Chairs (CRCs)—funded federally under a “national strategy to attract and retain leading and promising minds.” In order to benefit from this program, universities must “set and meet equity targets in recognition of the persistent systemic barriers faced by researchers who are women, gender minorities, racialized individuals, persons with disabilities and Indigenous Peoples.” The task of meeting such quotas has given rise to a burgeoning administrative bureaucracy, charged with documenting the personal characteristics of faculty members in excruciating detail.

In particular, the CRC program won’t cut a check before the recipient institution “identif[ies] a senior level university official who will be responsible for ensuring that the requirements have been followed and will attest to this by completing the program’s Institutional Attestation—Recruitment and Nomination Process on Convergence and providing such documentation as:

• the “names of senior officials responsible for ensuring the recruitment process was in line with the institution’s equity and diversity targets”;
• a “description of the equity, diversity and inclusion training provided to individuals who participated in the process (including training on unconscious bias)”;
• a “description of the role of the equity and diversity officer or designated equity, diversity and inclusion champion”;
• a “description of the strategy and proactive efforts made to identify a diverse pool of potential applicants”;
• copies of “relevant internal policies and guidelines (e.g., equity policies, tenure-track hiring practices/policies, collective agreement or equivalent)”; and
• a “description of the best practices used to collect data on the participation of individuals from the four designated groups [women, persons with disabilities, Indigenous peoples and members of visible minorities], including a copy of the self-identification form.”

These preferential-hiring policies were originally justified as stopgaps that would supposedly be phased out over the years, as disadvantaged groups caught up. Yet they’ve become part of Canada’s permanent policy landscape, with the federal government already having set expanded equity targets for 2029. Instead of being calibrated to reflect the pool of eligible applicants, the quotas simply match the general population. And so, by 2029, 50.9 percent of Canada Research Chairs must be “women and gender minorities,” 22 percent must be racialized minorities, 7.5 percent must be people with disabilities, and 4.9 percent must be Indigenous. As a result, some university recruitment efforts—including in fields that have little do with identity, such as quantum computing and computational biology—now flat-out exclude white males who don’t self-identify as disabled or LGBT+. And Canada’s leading university, the University of Toronto, recently announced that all recruiting for Canada Research Chairs will be restricted to the aforementioned “designated” groups in regard to engineering, dentistry, medicine, and various other disciplines.

Lots of Canadians think there’s nothing wrong with that at all. After all, white men have held the upper hand since the dawn of time. It’s time for other groups to catch up. But there’s a difference between vigorously searching for qualified minority candidates, and excluding certain groups altogether. Discrimination—of any kind—is unfair, even when it’s discrimination that’s supposed to compensate for past discrimination. Whatever the motives, it privileges group identity over individual merit and undermines the standards of excellence that should be at the heart of university operations.

In cases where universities are eager to get their diversity numbers up in a hurry, the preferred method is now something called the “cluster hire,” by which black or Indigenous candidates are hired in bulk (with their specific jobs to be determined later). At the University of Waterloo, for instance, a newly announced program will bring on “10 new Indigenous and 10 Black faculty members.” Their areas of specialty are negotiable, but not their skin colour.

Queen’s University recently advertised for a research chair in geotechnical engineering that’s open to applicants of any race—so long as candidates “self-identify as women.” (In apparent anticipation of complaints about how use of the word “women” might offend non-binary and genderfluid applicants, the university supplied a footnote explaining that the wording of applicable affirmative-action policies leaves the school no choice but to use the W-word.)

In other cases, universities will nominally permit members of any race or sex to apply for a job, but will add in ideological tests. At McGill University, for example, an ad for a tenure-track position indicated that “a demonstrated relevance of the candidate’s work to addressing anti-Black racism or systemic inequities … will be regarded as an important asset. Background in critical race theory is desirable but not required.” The hiring faculty? Computer Science.

In some cases, entire sub-programs are being set up for students of specified races. The medical school at Queen’s, for instance, is setting aside 10 of its 100 annual admissions to black and Indigenous students: “These students spend two years as undergraduates at Queen’s. Then, rather than take qualifying examinations such as the MCAT, which are part of the standard admissions process, they enter the four-year MD program in the Queen’s School of Medicine, provided they meet the pre-determined entrance criteria for [Queen’s University Accelerated Route to Medical School] students.” According to Dr. Jane Philpott, Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences, this will help make Queen’s “a leader in Canada on cultural safety, anti-racism, anti-colonialism, and anti-oppression in health professions education.”

Once students and faculty enter these departments, they will find abundant indications that they’ve now been co-opted by ideologues with overtly political objectives. On the website of the Vascular Dynamics Lab at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, a manifesto announces its administrators’ mission to “build an anti-racist lab”: “We are committed to this central value and invite members of the BIPOC and underrepresented groups to engage with us in this endeavour. In addition, we value Indigenous practices of knowledge and encourage a willingness to learn from and engage with Indigenous Knowledge alongside traditional Western ideology.” Apparently, this includes the expectation that staff and students attend regular anti-racism struggle sessions—known as “semesterly discussions on anti-racism and checking in on the work lab members are doing to create an anti-racist lab environment.”

As with many other Canadian centres of higher learning, this McMaster lab has adopted new hiring practices that “focus away from prior experience and instead [emphasize] interests of applicants, recognizing the barriers that BIPOC members may have faced in seeking out prior opportunities.” Objectively measurable criteria, such as publications, are now out of fashion, being nothing but a lagging indicator of a candidate’s privilege.

For decades now, there have been more women than men enrolled in Canadian postsecondary institutions. But that isn’t enough: Many Canadian academic administrators are demanding that every program be at least 50 percent female—including engineering, despite abundant evidence that men and women tend to exhibit, on average, different academic preferences. Meanwhile, no one seems to worry about the disappearance of young men from postsecondary education, despite the fact that women now outnumber men in Canadian post-secondary institutions by a ratio approaching 60-40.

For the most part, the broad Canadian public is unaware of how EDI (Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) programs are reshaping our leading institutions. And to the extent these programs get discussed at all, opposition tends to be stigmatized as opposition to “fairness” and equality. Almost all of us hold the well-intentioned belief that, all factors being equal, our institutions should be broadly representative of society as a whole, and that certain groups deserve special help to make up for past discrimination. In particular, we know that Canada has treated its Indigenous peoples quite badly, and that it’s past time to make amends. EDI is marketed as a solution to these issues. As one person I recently spoke to put it, “EDI just means we shouldn’t be assholes to each other. Who wouldn’t be for that?”

Well, one academic who isn’t for it is Mark Mercer, a philosophy professor at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, one of the few Canadian scholars who’s candidly pointed out that academic values and EDI are often at odds with one another. Or, as he bluntly puts it, “a university that engages in preferential hiring is signalling to the world that it can’t be serious about its academic mission.” He notes that, as with some of the examples cited above, EDI programs tend to come with ideological agendas that undermine the whole idea of merit, which is dismissed as a white, male, Eurocentric value that stands in the way of social justice. And while universities are supposed to foster dispassionate inquiry, EDI doctrine tends to smother such inquiry under the rhetoric of oppression.

Even scholars who may object to all of this are pressured to play along. All applicants for CRC positions, for instance, are now required to state whether or not they’re members of “equity-seeking” race or gender demographics. Choices currently on offer include trans, gender-fluid, non-binary, two-spirit, asexual, bisexual, and pansexual, with no doubt more to come. (Applicants may decline to self-identify if they wish, though one presumes that would serve to admit one’s lack of intersectional status.)

To cater to such new funding criteria, a wave of new research chairs has been created. The Chair in Queer Theory at Brandon University in Manitoba is held by a professor who got a whack of dough to write a book on the cultural history of the anus. Chairs in Indigenous studies have also proliferated, along with (not surprisingly) false claims of Indigeneity by white scholars. One of the broader goals of EDI is to “Indigenize” scholarship in every field, including the sciences. This is why Lana Ray, the Indigenous Research Chair in Decolonial Futures at Lakehead University, won a $1.2-million grant to study cancer prevention using traditional Indigenous healing practices. (“We need to stop framing prevalent risk factors of cancer as such, and start thinking about them as symptoms of colonialism,” says Ray.)

What’s ironic about Canada’s heavy-handed efforts at affirmative action is that, in most cases, meeting the quota for so-called racialized minorities is no problem at all—because Canadian campuses are overflowing with high-achieving non-white immigrants, especially from South and East Asia. Indeed, it is some of these immigrant scholars who’ve been speaking out loudest against the Canadian academy’s current fixation on affirmative action—and, in some cases, paying a heavy price as a result.

Last year Rima Azar, an Arab-Canadian professor of health psychology at New Brunswick’s tiny and bucolic Mount Allison university, used her blog to critique the dominant ideological currents she observed on campus. “[New Brunswick] is NOT racist,” she wrote. “Canada is NOT racist. We do not have ‘systemic’ racism or ‘systemic’ discrimination. We just have systemic naivety because we are a young country and because we want to save the world.” A few students were horrified, notwithstanding the fact that Prof. Azar, a woman who grew up in war-torn Lebanon, would qualify for membership in at least two “equity-seeking” groups. She was promptly investigated by her university and suspended.

Mark Mercer, the above-quoted philosophy professor, paid a price, too. Two years ago, he commented on the controversy surrounding another professor, Verushka Lieutenant-Duval of the University of Ottawa, who’d used the n-word in class during an academic discussion about how groups reclaim words and phrases used to disparage or oppress them. When all hell broke loose, Prof. Mercer was censured by his own university for taking Lieutenant-Duval’s side.

Tomáš Hudlický, one of Canada’s leading chemists, devoted much of his career to synthesizing natural compounds used to fight cancer. Over the two decades he spent at Brock University in Ontario, he secured millions in research funding and won international recognition for his work—a genuine embodiment of the Canada Research Chair program goals. Then in 2020, he published a paper in a prestigious international scientific journal that questioned the impact of diversity hiring on the quality of scientific research in his field. He didn’t condemn the idea of diversity as such, but he did condemn the “preferential” treatment of women and minorities. When a firestorm ensued, Brock threw its star professor under the bus with not one but two official statements (with the second one, quoted below, apparently being necessitated by complaints that the first was insufficiently scathing):

On Friday, June 5, the University became aware of a paper written by Professor Tomáš Hudlický that was published and then retracted by the journal Angewandte Chemie. The paper includes highly objectionable statements that contrast the promotion of equity and diversity with the promotion of academic merit. These statements are hurtful and alienating to members of diverse communities and historically marginalized groups who have, too often, seen their qualifications and abilities called into question. The article moreover contains descriptions of the graduate supervisor-graduate student relationship that connote disrespect and subservience. These statements could be alarming to students and others who have the reasonable expectation of respectful and supportive mentorship. The statements contained in the paper are not representative of the Brock community. They are utterly at odds with the values of Brock’s deeply committed research mentors, and all those working hard to build an inclusive and diverse community. They do not reflect the principles of inclusivity, diversity and equity included in the University’s mission, vision and values as approved by our Senate and Board of Trustees.

Following this, Hudlický was ostracized by his colleagues. But never mind him. In 2022, we are supposed to believe that the real hero of cancer research is Lakehead’s Lana Rey, who claims cancer is a product of colonialism. That’s nonsense, of course. But what matters on Canadian campuses now isn’t what you write and teach, but who you are and what you look like.