By Geoff Horsman, September 11, 2025
In Canada in 2025, a scientist can be denied government research funding for expressing sentiments like the following in a grant application:
- “I treat people as individuals and do not agree with assigning people as more- or less-deserving (e.g. having faced barriers) based on intersectional identities like race or sex.”
- Institutionally mandated “racial discrimination in publicly funded science is one major barrier facing students in science.”
I know this to be true because that scientist is me.
Despite strong scores on the scientific components of my NSERC Discovery grant application, it was not funded because I did not “describe an approach to recruit a diverse HQP [Highly Qualified Personnel] and provide an inclusive training environment.” Although government officials could neither clearly explain my sins nor offer a path to absolution, my views were obviously out of step with the official state ideology called Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI), which scientists must satisfactorily address to obtain funding.
A senior administrator at my university, on the other hand, was generous with advice. After I was denied matching funds to temporarily keep my lab running, the administrator told me that grant applications were no place to honestly examine EDI’s empirical or moral shortcomings. Rather than preserve my integrity, I was advised to “play the game” and allow the government to compel my speech. I need not sincerely support EDI, I was told – I need only to give the impression that I do.
This casual attack on truth reflects a broader war on liberalism, one front of which is being waged through Canada’s major research funding agencies – esteemed scientific institutions that have been captured by an activist agenda.
The “Tri-Council” – the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) – provide the bulk of public research funding in academia. However, their increasingly “progressive” policies and programs – fuelled by EDI ideology – are gradually displacing truth-seeking as the highest scientific virtue.
Variously described as “illiberal progressivism,” “Critical Social Justice,” or “Woke,” this ideology often seeks group-based advantages for historically marginalized racial or sexual identities – even at the expense of academic merit and impartial inquiry. While once confined to the humanities and social sciences, this ideological creep now touches even the hard sciences.
The Tri-Council disseminates this ideology to researchers through four main mechanisms:
- Prioritizing politically themed research.
- Restricting eligibility on identity-based criteria.
- Requiring applicants to make explicit ideological commitments.
- Evaluating research according to politicized notions of “social benefit.”
Each of these mechanisms redirects research funding from open-ended, curiosity-driven inquiry toward politically prescribed goals. The consequences of ideological incursion include undermining the independence, quality, and credibility of science in Canadian universities.
It wasn’t always this way. The end of the Second World War witnessed a massive shift in Canada’s academic research funding landscape. The old system – a diverse mix of wealthy donors, private foundations, industry, local government, and universities themselves – was replaced by a handful of federal agencies, which fuelled the rapid expansion of university research and graduate education.
Today, the Tri-Council provides the bulk of public research funding in academia. While this centralization has given scientists predictable, coordinated, and accessible funding, it has also concentrated risk: the Tri-Council can be swayed by the ideological commitments of the day, with effects that cascade through the entire academic research ecosystem.
A common objection to this concern is that Tri-Council funding does not constitute a dominant share of overall university income. Indeed, in the 2021–22 fiscal year, federal funding – including Tri-Council sources – accounted for just 10.5 per cent of Canadian universities’ total revenues, compared to 35.5 per cent from provincial governments and 32.5 per cent from tuition fees. This proportion, though modest, still plays a strategic role: while not the largest source of revenue, Tri-Council funding disproportionately shapes research agendas through peer-review structures, eligibility criteria, institutional pressures, and funding priorities.
Academics in all fields strive to compete for the grants that have prestige and command respect for those who receive them. While contributing modestly to overall university operating budgets, the Tri-Council exerts influence through its structure and framing of what counts as “valuable” or “fundable science.”
Mechanisms of ideological dissemination
Agency Research Priorities
In a publicly funded system, the government inevitably decides what research areas to fund. These decisions are never value-neutral, but recent federal funding calls often reflect an intentional set of political priorities.
Examples include Indigenous Innovation and Leadership in Research, Global Affairs Canada proposals aligning with Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy, Plastics Science and Innovation for a Cleaner and More Sustainable Future, and Embracing Diversity to Achieve Precision and Increase Health Equity. These programs often embed specific social or environmental frameworks – such as prioritizing group identity or a “circular economy” – into the funding call itself. This steers applicants toward projects aligned with collectivist policy goals and away from championing free market solutions.
From a policy perspective, this puts a big thumb on the scale: entire lines of inquiry may be overlooked because they do not meet the strong ideological components of the application criteria. This can also affect research design, arguably compromising the integrity of the research itself.
Discriminatory disbursements
Some Tri-Council programs further politicize funding by explicitly restricting eligibility by characteristics like race, sex, or gender identity. For example, two of the Tri-Council undergraduate summer research award (USRA) programs – which provide undergraduates with critical research experience – are reserved “exclusively for Black student researchers.” Similarly, the Canada Research Chairs (CRC) program employs racial quotas: one analysis found 55 per cent of advertised CRC positions explicitly barred straight White men, and the long-surpassed 22 per cent target for “racialized individuals” (i.e. non-Whites) now stands at 32 per cent. As another example, the CIHR Research Excellence, Diversity, and Independence (REDI) Early Career Transition Award excludes White people and non-Black men.
These programs can erode trust in the fairness of research funding and potentially undermine support for federal science funding. Such erosion is exemplified by a widely panned CRC advertisement open only to those “who self-identify as women, transgender, gender-fluid, non-binary, or Two-spirit.”
Required ideological commitments
A growing number of grants require applicants to express support for EDI initiatives. For example, the New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF) “has formally embedded EDI requirements in its program design” and evaluates the mandatory EDI section on a pass/fail basis. Applicants “must clearly demonstrate their strong commitment to EDI” and to integrating people from designated identity groups. My inquiries to the NFRF revealed that, in 2021, 2.5 per cent of applications to its Exploration program were rejected solely on EDI grounds. (This figure comes from a 2023 correspondence with NFRF administrators, who indicated that in the 2021 Exploration competition, 2.5 per cent of applications were deemed not to meet the EDI criteria, while 29.5 per cent received a “mixed pass.”)
Meeting EDI requirements can be challenging for scientists accustomed to universal standards of rigour – standards which, incidentally, have demonstrated that EDI is ineffective and even harmful. For example, NFRF requires applicants to identify “structural biases that could affect members of underrepresented groups.” When consulting the EDI Best Practices guide (which makes no mention of “structural biases”), “systemic barriers” are described as being “‘unseen’ to those who do not experience them,” but “all individuals must recognize that systemic barriers exist.”
This is most charitably characterized as pseudoscience. The scientific process of knowledge production (which American intellectual Jonathan Rauch calls liberal science) is governed by two simple rules: 1) no one gets the final say (knowledge is provisional) and 2) no one has personal authority (knowledge is universal). Reputable scientists insist that, for experimental results to be valid, they must be replicable by others – even those separated by language, culture, geography, and time. Claiming that knowledge is invisible to others – based on skin colour, for example – violates Rauch’s second rule.
The Tri-Council’s promotion of invisible knowledge is concerning, but still more alarming is their requirement that scientists affirm the existence of phenomena that are not empirically verifiable. Such program requirements for compelled speech not only propagate ideology – they erode scientific integrity.
Assessment of social benefits
Even programs described as curiosity-driven now incorporate political and social criteria. The NSERC Discovery Grant program, for example, is framed as promoting “creativity and innovation” to “pursue promising research avenues as they emerge.” Yet the merit indicators used to evaluate applications include addressing “socio-economic and environmental needs.”
Such assessments are subjective and often beyond the expertise of applicants and adjudicators. The grants are also evaluated by academic peers who, as surveys show, lean heavily to one end of the political spectrum. This creates a bias towards politically aligned projects, potentially excluding valuable research that does not conform to the predominant academic worldview.
Evaluating social and environmental impacts undermines the stated goal of supporting independent, curiosity-driven science and politicizes the grant evaluation process.
The consequences of ideological incursion
Declining research independence and quality
The practical outcome of these ideological dissemination mechanisms is scientific decline and a visible drift towards politically aligned research. Projects like the NFRF-funded Decolonizing Light demonstrate that signalling ideological compliance can supplant scientific merit. As research funds are redirected from science to politics – and in only one political direction – science suffers resource deprivation and researchers will be hesitant to pursue avenues of inquiry that might offend or challenge predominant views.
Incentivized dishonesty and penalties for dissent
Politicized funding rewards dishonesty. Although some scientists are troubled by required EDI statements professing a belief in invisible systemic forces, they rarely risk research funding by saying what they really think – indeed, some professors have privately admitted to falsely proclaiming support for EDI. This undermines the integrity of scientists and their work. The public might reasonably wonder, if scientists will affirm invisible forces to get a grant, what will they say to get a job, secure tenure, or publish in Nature?
Of course, there is reason to lie – conscientious objection can come with career costs, as my own experience shows. Similarly, a chemistry professor was denied funding for stating that he hires on merit. In other cases, simply stating a desire to hold all students to a high standard is problematic.
Institutional incentives to conform
Tri-Council funding creates opaque financial incentives. Every grant comes with institutional overhead, dispensed through the Research Support Fund, to ensure that “research projects are conducted in world-class facilities with the best equipment and administrative support available.” However, because these costs are mostly fixed – a laboratory’s administrative and capital costs do not dramatically change if a researcher is awarded a second or third research grant – the institution is incentivized to secure ever more grants, which can be used for “central and departmental” administration and “development and promotion of equity, diversity, and inclusion.” This provides one explanation for the ever-expanding university administrative class, and the recent arrival of EDI enforcers within it.
These incentives foster an administrative culture that prioritizes securing politically aligned funding over protecting academic freedom and open inquiry. Being encouraged, as I was, to misrepresent deeply held beliefs normalizes strategic dishonesty and reflects a deeper, systemic corrosion of institutional norms and values.
The Tri-Council is promoting a selective political view through research priorities, eligibility rules, ideological litmus tests, and evaluation criteria. Science thrives when scientists are guided by evidence and motivated by curiosity. If the Tri-Council continues to condition funding on the ideological compliance of researchers, Canadian academic research will become more politicized, less credible, and increasingly irrelevant, eroding the very principles of objectivity and truth-seeking at the heart of the university. Reversing the decline of Canadian science depends on ensuring decisions are guided by merit rather than politics. Only then can science resist politicization and preserve its role as a reliable source of truth.
Geoff Horsman is an associate professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Wilfrid Laurier University, where his research involves understanding how microbes assemble molecules like antibiotics. He also advocates for academic freedom through his work on the board of the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship, as co-chair of Laurier Heterodox Academy, and as a contributor to publications like The American Mind and the recent anthology, The War on Science.
