In April, Memorial University—the only university in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador—posted five job openings for prestigious Canada Research Chair (CRC) professorships. In all five cases, it was specified explicitly that able-bodied white men need not apply. Rather, the jobs were reserved for members of “equity groups, including women; 2SLGBTQIA+ people; Indigenous peoples; racialised persons; and persons with disabilities.” 

Following the uproar, Memorial administrators refused to apologise or back down. Instead, they explained that universities across Canada were all doing the same thing (even if they weren’t so blatant about it)—since any school seeking to get Canada Research Chair funding from the federal government must demonstrate that they are tearing down “systemic barriers in academic hiring.”  

Memorial University isn’t wrong. As a group of researchers led by University of Buckingham professor Eric Kaufmann details in a new report published by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, Canada’s $300-million-per-year Canada Research Chairs program restricts disbursements to universities that hit aggressive affirmative-action targets set by government officials.

In 2025, the most recent year for which statistics are available, women and “gender-equity-seeking groups” (i.e., trans, “non-binary,” and all the rest) made up 61 percent of chairs; “racialised individuals” accounted for 40 percent; and Indigenous peoples just over five percent. In all cases, these numbers exceed the preferentially recruited group’s corresponding share of the general population. So it isn’t surprising that some universities—Memorial appears to be one of them—have to resort to blunt able-bodied-white-men-need-not-apply language to hit their spreadsheet targets.

The equity excellence trade-off: A study of EDI in the Canada Research Chairs Program | Macdonald-Laurier Institute

The analysis reveals that EDI has actively weakened Canadian research and reduced overall academic performance at Canadian universities.

Macdonald-Laurier InstituteSkander Belouizdad

As Kaufmann notes in his report, the mania for identity-based hiring and admissions that’s taken hold of Canadian academic culture is a relatively recent phenomenon, largely dating to the mid-to-late 2010s. Until then, most Canadians regarded affirmative action as an American institution that had been developed to address that country’s shameful history of slavery and Jim Crow. Canada, by contrast, came into being more than three decades after the British Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. Historically, our universities typically applied the same admissions and hiring standards to people of all races.

That changed about a decade ago, as the influence of social media began eroding the cultural firewall that had once insulated the sleepy world of Canadian academia from America’s race-based culture war. During this period, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government promoted race-based policy-making as a means to ingratiate itself to young voters. And by the time he’d worn out his welcome with voters (of all ages) in the early 2020s, the Canadian academic establishment he subsidised was embracing affirmative action with a fervour that even the most progressive American liberal-arts college would find embarrassing. As alluded to above, this expansive northern version of affirmative action doesn’t just focus on race, but also numerous other self-identifiers, including some, such as “two-spirit,” that even academics themselves are completely incapable of defining.

What Does Two-Spirit Mean? Canada’s Vague Indigenous Identity

In a new report, Canadian educators are instructed about a Two-Spirit LGBT subcategory that, even the authors admit, lacks any real definition.

QuilletteJonathan Kay

Except, of course, no one in Canada calls it “affirmative action,” or uses other straightforward terms such as “racial preferences.” The most common euphemism is now “inclusive excellence,” though new variants emerge all the time, such as “Black flourishing.”

For a representative sampling of this faddish vernacular, I refer readers to the University of Waterloo’s recent press release, boasting that the school had been praised by academic activists for its “ongoing commitment to addressing anti-Black racism and fostering Black flourishing, inclusive excellence, mutuality and accountability…through initiatives that amplify Black voices, cultivate community partnerships and address systemic barriers.”

This kind of preposterous word salad, which is now part of the everyday institutional idiom at schools across Canada, doesn’t just supply a series of gauzy euphemisms for lower academic standards. It also implicitly conflates the idea of racial preferences with anti-racism, thereby pre-emptively dismissing naysayers as anti-anti-racists (which is to say, racists).

Indeed, it has become popular to claim that Canadian universities would (literally) be incapable of fulfilling their educational mandates without “equitable inclusion”—i.e., identity-based hiring and admissions—since “equitable inclusion is critical to…the ability of universities and colleges to educate.”

In his new think-tank report, titled The Equity-Excellence Trade-Off, Kaufmann and his co-authors attempt to put a price tag on these policies, using the CRC as a case study. First, they downloaded a list of CRC award holders. Then they compared the identity markers of the awardees against their respective h-indexes—this being a standard scholarly metric derived from the number of papers an author has published, as adjusted for the number of times each paper has been cited.