Parliament’s new EDI recommendations are based on a flawed logic that misreads equity and research excellence

The recently released report of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Science and Research recommends that Canada’s federal granting agencies eliminate all references to equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in the process of awarding federal research funding. The Standing Committee labels EDI policies as ‘discriminatory’ and blames the policies for ‘weakening the quality of Canadian research’. The Committee’s call elevates backlash against EDI from public debate to federal policy and echoes the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s recent report that positioned EDI as being at odds with research excellence.  

The Parliamentary Committee’s recommendation, however, rests on a deeply flawed assumption that research excellence can be separated from the social conditions that shape who enters academia, whose work is recognized and which questions are deemed worthy of study. Ironically, the Committee’s own report documents extensive testimony demonstrating that research excellence is difficult to define, that traditional metrics of scholarly achievement are imperfect and often biased, and that diversity can strengthen both research quality and innovation.  

Backlash against EDI often presents equity as compromising excellence. This framing is deeply misleading. Equity initiatives do not require universities or funding agencies to abandon excellence. Rather, they challenge narrow assumptions about how excellence is recognized and measured. The real question is not whether Canada should pursue excellence or equity in research. It is whether our understanding of excellence is sufficiently rigorous and inclusive to identify talent wherever it exists. 

Underlying critiques of EDI is the assumption that universities operate as neutral meritocracies and that the concept of merit is itself objective and universally agreed-upon. Admissions and hiring decisions have never been based on objective indicators. Grade point averages, standardized test scores, publication counts and citation indexes are inherently biased, as Alex Usher aptly argued in his critique of the MacDonald-Laurier Institute report. The university is not neutral and neither is the conceptualization or application of excellence. Opportunities to demonstrate merit are not distributed equally. Educational achievement is influenced by poverty, racism, access to quality schools, stable housing, strong familial and community support systems and a host of other social determinants of health. A student who succeeds despite significant barriers arguably demonstrates as much, if not more, academic potential than someone who benefitted from substantial privilege.  

The Council of Canadian Academies observes that traditional measures of excellence often unintentionally reproduce inequities when systemic barriers remain unexamined. Critics also suggest that EDI lowers standards by privileging identity over achievement. Implicit in this argument is the assumption that candidates from equity-denied groups are less qualified. This is simply not the case. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) documented longstanding barriers to Indigenous participation in post-secondary education and called on institutions to address colonial assumptions embedded in policy and practice. EDI initiatives do not lower standards; they seek to ensure talented scholars are not excluded by the systemic barriers identified by the TRC. EDI does not seek to replace excellence; rather, it seeks to ensure it is recognized equitably within broader social contexts.  

The Standing Committee’s recommendations reveal a deeper contradiction at the heart of the current backlash against EDI. The report endorses the removal of EDI from funding decisions while simultaneously acknowledging evidence that traditional measures of merit and excellence are neither neutral nor uniformly reliable. Witnesses testified that research excellence is inherently multidimensional, difficult to define and poorly captured by simplistic indicators such as publication counts and citation metrics. The Committee also endorsed continued implementation of principles from the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, which explicitly cautions against overreliance on narrow bibliometric measures. Yet, the recommendation to remove EDI rests on precisely the assumption that excellence can be standardized according to a set of universal metrics, and readily and objectively identified without attention to systemic barriers and inequities.  

The Macdonald-Laurier Institute report further exemplifies this contradiction by claiming that efforts to improve representation in programs such as the Canada Research Chairs initiative have come at the expense of scholarly quality. The report uses tenuous reasoning to argue that EDI policies have produced an “equity-excellence trade-off” and then uses that flawed logic to estimate millions of dollars in lost academic productivity. The report treats the h-index as a definitive measure of scholarly quality, when in reality, bibliometric indicators have long been recognized as imperfect proxies with significant limitations. The h-index is influenced by factors such as career length, disciplinary publication practices, collaboration patterns, and citation cultures. Using a single metric to rank the worth of scholars across diverse fields and career trajectories is methodologically fraught and risks confusing measurement with merit itself. 

More fundamentally, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute report reproduced the very assumption that EDI scholars have challenged for decades: that excellence can be objectively identified outside the social and institutional contexts in which it is produced. Universities do not evaluate faculty members solely on citation counts, nor should they. Research impact, teaching effectiveness, community engagement, knowledge mobilization, mentorship, and contributions to institutional life all matter. Ironically, critiques of EDI frequently commit the same error they accuse EDI proponents of making. They reduce complex human achievements to a single characteristic. While EDI critics claim that universities prioritize identity over excellence, many of their own analyses reduce excellence to publication counts and citations. Neither approach adequately captures the breadth of what universities value. Excellence is and has always been multidimensional.       

The Standing Committee’s recommendation to remove EDI from federal funding decisions reflects a broader misunderstanding of how excellence emerges within universities and research systems. Excellence does not arise in a social vacuum. It is shaped by access to education, opportunities for participation, institutional cultures, and the criteria used to evaluate achievement. Ignoring these realities does not make research funding more objective. It simply obscures the structural conditions that continue to influence who succeeds and whose contributions are recognized.  

Universities can achieve excellence through equity, diversity, and inclusion by identifying, recruiting and retaining talent wherever it exists. This requires institutions to recognize that historical and contemporary inequities shape access to opportunities, credentials and career trajectories. It also requires a willingness to critically examine the metrics and assumptions that have traditionally been treated as neutral. Universities inevitably reflect social values and institutional histories, which is precisely why claims of neutral meritocracy deserve critical scrutiny. The real threat to academic excellence is not EDI. It is the persistence of the meritocracy myth: the comforting but inaccurate belief that universities have always been neutral arbiters of talent. EDI challenges that myth by insisting that excellence is too important to be constrained by historical patterns of exclusion. Rather than lowering standards, EDI asks universities to broaden their understanding of where excellence can be found and how it can flourish.