University defends equity requirement for top research posts

Canada’s right-wing media and a senior former conservative politician have attacked Memorial University (MU, St John’s, Newfoundland) over postings that advertised positions for five Canada Research Chairs (CRCs) because white heterosexual males are not eligible to apply for the prestigious positions.

As a participating institution in the federally funded CRC programme, MU “is required to follow the programme’s equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) requirements when recruiting and nominating candidates”, said a statement provided to University World News by Chad Pelley, MU’s manager of communications and media relations.

The statement said, in part, that “Canadian universities that receive funding for Canada Research Chair positions must demonstrate progress toward nationally established equity targets and address systemic barriers in academic hiring”.

The statement further said: “[A]ll candidates – regardless of background – must meet rigorous standards of research excellence. Final appointments are subject to both institutional review and a national peer-review process administered through the programme.”

Writing in the Alberta-based, conservative Western Standard newspaper, columnist Linda Slobodian was dismissive of the programme. She stated that “whites make up 70% of the 40.4 million population” and questioned why “qualified white males – particularly those exclusively attracted to females – must be denied employment opportunities to make room for minorities”.

Using the American term ‘DEI’ and not the Canadian ‘EDI’, Slobodian takes aim at the “federal Equity Employment Act and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion)”. They “are ludicrously depicted as measures to guarantee fair treatment for all”.

Rather, she charges: “They’re used as weapons. They’re a façade for systematic racism, sometimes laced with spite and hatred, targeting and impacting both male and female white Canadians.”

Warming to her theme, Slobodian added: “Memorial accepts funding from white taxpayers through provincial grants and federal contributions. White students pay tuition fees. It accepts donations from alumni, community members, and organisations, even if they’re white.

“But these academic hypocrites draw the line at giving whiteys who don’t claim a spot in the ridiculous MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ acronym a chance to compete for jobs.”

MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ stands for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Two-Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, and Additional identities. The MMIWG at the beginning of the initials is in recognition that in Canada Indigenous women and girls are disproportionately victims of sexual assault and violence.

None of the five postings used the term ‘MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+’ (which, incidentally, is not an acronym but an initialism). Rather, the postings said that the competition was open only to applicants currently employed at MU and identifying as members of one or more of the employment equity groups (as defined by the Human Rights Act): women, 2SLGBTQIA+ people; Indigenous peoples; racialised peoples; and persons with disabilities.

The 2,285 CRCs are funded by a federal allocation of CA$311 million (approximately US$228 million) per annum. The University of Toronto, the nation’s largest and most research-intensive university, has the largest number of CRCs: 330. The University of British Columbia (Vancouver) has the second largest number: 192. MU has 12 CRCs.

There are two levels of CRCs. Tier 1 is for a five-year term with a salary of CA$100,000 and CA$20,000 a year for research. Tier 2 is a seven-year term with a salary of CA$200,000 and a research stipend of CA$20,000 per annum.

Charter of rights

As the presence of EDI statements in the job postings shows, Canada has carved out a very different course than has its southern neighbour, the United States, when it comes to recognising and working to ameliorate structural remnants of racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination.

On the first day of his second administration, 21 January 2025, President Donald J Trump signed a number of executive orders banning DEI in the federal government and de facto banning preferential hiring in institutions, like colleges and universities, that accept federal funds.

In mid-February 2025, Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights in the US Department of Education, issued a “Dear Colleague” letter.

While it did not have the force of law, he nevertheless told colleges and universities that the administration was extending the 2023 decision of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) that overturned affirmative action in admissions, hiring, promotion and compensation.

Trainor’s letter sought to impose a de facto ban on targeted hiring of under-represented populations. In June of this year, suspecting that the University of California’s hiring practices privileged race and sex, the Department of Justice opened an investigation into the institution, one of many that critics have charged is meant to create a chill as much as it is intended to find violations of federal employment law.

And, as University World News has reported, several years before Trump returned to power, states like Florida and Texas passed laws banning DEI offices and practices in hiring.

MU and other Canadian universities and colleges (as well as every other public institution and the government itself) operate in a different constitutional regimen than their opposite numbers in the United States.

The first clause of Section 15 of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms is similar to the combined impact of parts of the US Constitution and SCOTUS decisions, as it states: “Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.”

However, recognising that certain groups suffer from historical and structural disadvantages, led by then prime minister Pierre Trudeau, the authors of the 1984 constitution included a second clause in this section of the Charter that authorises amelioration efforts.

This second clause says that the declarations in the first clause “do … not preclude any law, program or activity that has as its object the amelioration of conditions of disadvantaged individuals or groups, including those that are disadvantaged because of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.”

The federal and provincial human rights acts and the commissions that create regulations, such as the one referenced by MU’s CRC position postings, rely on this section of the Charter.

Expansion of equality

Three years after the CRC programme was established in 2000, eight female professors, supported by the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), filed a complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission, saying that the CRC was operating in violation of the Charter and federal human rights law.

In an article published in the CAUT’s magazine, Bulletin, on 1 October 2019, David Robinson said that the violation was a function of the funding formula. It “unfairly funnel[led] the majority of dollars to large, research-intensive universities, and the process was not accountable or transparent as to who received Chair appointments, or why”.

This complaint led to a first settlement in 2006 in which women, persons with a disability, Aboriginal peoples and visible minorities were designated “protected groups”, which encouraged nominees to identify themselves as members of any of these groups and for this information to be collected to “establish targets for representation of members in these groups”.

For a variety of reasons, little progress was made until 2017, when the federal court issued an order enforcing the 2006 agreement and the government launched the EDI Action Plan.

The plan required “that institutions must develop their own EDI plans, publish information and data about the management of their Chair allocations” by December 2019.

Six months before that deadline, the complainants and the government reached a settlement that included “a ten-year framework for the Chairs Program to reflect the diversity of Canada’s population, setting institutional targets not just for the representation of the four groups but to address the under-representation of members of the LGBTQ+ community as well”.

The Bulletin article quoted Marjorie Griffin Cohen, one of the complainants, saying that the agreement represents “a significant expansion of the concept of equality and something that has the power to effect significant change, especially if it expanded to other groups and applied more widely in public institutions in the future.”

‘Better research’

Among the five CRCs being advertised at MU is one in AI-driven Navigation for Arctic and Harsh Environments (Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering), one in Musculoskeletal Health and Genomic Map of the Newfoundland and Labrador Population (Faculty of Medicine), and Indigenous Knowledge, Youth and Digital Technology (Department of Anthropology).

Against the backdrop of a number of incidents over the past few years of “pretendians” (including the folk singer Buffy St Marie) who have claimed Indigenous positions in Canadian colleges and universities, Robin Whitaker, who in addition to being the president of CAUT is a professor of anthropology, underscored that the CRC in Indigenous Knowledge is a position is one of merit and equity.

Instead, she said CAUT believes that each CRC is an instance of combining equity with rigorous peer review to produce “a better research talent pool and better research” across the board.

“These targets reflect the fact that there has been structural inequality in the past, that historically we haven’t seen groups represented in proportion to their presence in the population.”

As did Pelley, she emphasised that MU is required to file an equity plan with the government. The CRCs are vetted twice, she told University World News: once by the university that recommends them for the chair and once by the CRC programme.

By way of example, she noted that when she was pursuing her degrees in anthropology in the late 1990s and early 2000s, she did not have a female anthropology professor until she was in graduate school. Anthropology still does not reflect the census population, she added. “It’s definitely much more white than it is racialised. But that’s changing.

“In terms of gender, it’s much more reflective [of the population], but that didn’t happen by accident,” Whitaker said. “It happened because people made an effort to change things.

“I think we would want to see the same thing happen in all disciplines, in all sciences. Why wouldn’t we want to have women and persons with disabilities in the pool of talent?”

Competition for jobs

Whitaker also addressed two other issues she believes are driving opposition to the EDI requirements in the CRC. The first is the drying up of good academic jobs in Canada.

Financial exigencies, due to falling enrolment, partially caused by the vast reduction in international students in Canada, led the faculty union at MU to warn of the possibility of seven out of the eight contractual positions in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics being eliminated.

“If there were plenty of good jobs for scholars, I suspect that there would be less anxiety about the CRC positions. The question we should be asking is: ‘Why are our governments not funding post-secondary education research in a way that people don’t feel they’re chasing scarce resources all the time?’”

Whitaker also noted that while it is a mistake to take the Twitterverse as a representative sample, “many of the anti-DEI narratives [as referenced by the US and Canadians echoing them] are coming from the US, where there have been quite a few attacks at the state and federal level”, and this is being shared with “people closer to home”.

Whitaker deliberately used the American term ‘DEI’ because she was referring to Americans and those Canadians who echo them. One such Canadian using DEI is Jason Kenney, former conservative premier of Alberta (2019 to 2022) and former senior minister (2007 to 2015) in the federal cabinet of conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Above a repost of the job offerings on 21 April, Kenney wrote: “One per cent of the male population of Newfoundland was killed in the Great War. Memorial University was given its name to be a living, permanent memorial to their sacrifice. None of those men, or those who served with them, would now be eligible to teach at the university named in honour of their sacrifice.”

Speaking for herself, Whitaker, a Newfoundlander by birth who took her BA at MU, said: “Memorial University is a memorial to freedom. It’s to ensure freedom to learn and that freedom will be expanded if students have the freedom to learn from the full diversity of professors.”