‘Inclusive’ hiring has damaged Canadian research output: report

Canadian mandates on race-based hiring quotas in academia have done measurable damage to the country’s research productivity, according to a new report by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

Ever since 2017, Canadian universities have been subject to strict identity-based hiring quotas as a condition of receiving federal research funding.

In recent years, this has resulted in a regular stream of academic job postings that are explicitly barred to straight, white men. Newfoundland’s Memorial University, for instance, advertised a tranche of five new jobs in April that were open only to “women; 2SLGBTQIA+ people; Indigenous peoples; racialized persons; and persons with disabilities.”

And according to a 54-page report published Tuesday, all of this identity-based hiring has yielded a notable drop off in the amount of Canadian research being published or cited by other scholars.

“Our analysis … confirms that diversity is not merely neutral but can lower performance,” reads the conclusion of The Equity-Excellence Tradeoff report.

It added, “all told, ending EDI (equity, diversity and inclusion) initiatives in Canadian research should be a top priority for any responsible government.”

The report zeroed in on the $311-million per year Canada Research Chair program, the federal research fund with the most overt strictures on identity-based hiring.

The program funds 2,285 university-based Canada Research Chairs whose salary and office expenses are covered entirely by federal grant money. For a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair, for instance, schools receive $200,000 a year. For Tier 2, it’s $100,000 per year.

In return, schools must submit to federally set quotas on the race, gender and sexual characteristics of the researchers they’re allowed to hire.

According to the most recent “equity targets” published by the Government of Canada, Canada Research Chairs must be 22 per cent “racialized,” 4.9 per cent “Indigenous” and 50.9 per cent “women and gender equity-seeking groups.”

These targets take the form of regularly updated tables in which individual universities are told the precise number of Canada Research Chairs they’re required to hire in one of four “equity-deserving” groups.

McGill University’s most recent equity quotas, for instance, require the school to hire 34 “racialized” Canada Research Chairs, five Indigenous Canada Research Chairs and 10 “persons with disabilities.”

The Canada Research Chair program began in 2000, but its identity mandates started only in 2017 under the oversight of then prime minister Justin Trudeau. And in just nine years, the effect has been precipitous.

At the program’s launch, 80 per cent of Canada Research Chairs were white males. As of 2025, white males comprised just 25 per cent of the total.

Macdonald-Laurier Institute analysts ranked the productivity of Canada Research Chairs both before and after the identity mandates.

What they determined was that the quantity and quality of Canada Research Chair scholarship had declined from between 10 to 15 per cent, which the report attributed to the “non-meritorious appointment of less qualified Black, Indigenous, and female chairs.”

The report categorized the performance of 1,906 Canada Research Chairs by their “h-index,” a standard global measure of a scholar’s productivity and relevance.

An h-index ranks the number of papers in which a researcher is listed as an author, as well as the number of instances in which those papers have been cited by others, and then arrives at a number that is typically between one and 100.

Currently, Canada’s highest h-index belongs to McMaster University health researcher Gordon Guyatt. With his name on 1,715 publications and 366,582 citations, as of last count, he has an h-index of 290.

In a close second is another McMaster University health researcher, Salim Yusuf, with an h-index of 280.

The Macdonald-Laurier Institute paper broke down the median h-index for different races of Canada Research Chairs, and found that the cohorts with the lowest research productivity are the same cohorts being given priority for academic jobs.

The average white or Asian male scholar, for instance, had an h-index of 39. For male scholars who were Black or Indigenous, meanwhile, the h-index came to 25.

There was also an h-index gap between women and men generally. Male Canada Research Chairs averaged an h-index of 38, while female scholars averaged 28.

From this, the paper concluded that the gradual replacement of high-achieving cohorts with lower-achieving ones was coming at the cost of lower quality research — at least in terms of h-index scores.

“There will be many cases in which female, Black, or Indigenous scholars will not impose a cost, but on average — under an EDI dispensation in which race and sex considerations can outweigh scholarly merit — this will be the case,” it said.

As one example, the paper noted that in instances where a university took a position previously filled by a white or Asian scholar, and filled it with a Black or Indigenous hire, that’s likely to entail an “average loss of 3.2 h-index points.”