Canadian universities, at the direction of the federal Liberal government and the research granting agencies for which it’s responsible, have made race- and sex- based discrimination a matter of everyday business. And they don’t seem to have a plan to pare it back.

Take the president of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Ted Hewitt, who attended the House of Commons committee on science and research last Thursday for its study on post-secondary funding. Under his organization’s watch is the administration of the Canada Research Chairs Program, which is supposed to provide prestigious multi-year grants to highly competitive researchers across Canada. Only, it can hardly be called competitive, as the program is bound by strict diversity quotas.