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A recurring subject of this newsletter is the sheer quantity of federal research funding that disappears into the abyss of activist, identity-obsessed grievance studies.
In prior decades, researchers funded by Canadian tax dollars have invented canola oil, discovered an Ebola vaccine, figured out how to separate bitumen from sand, and pioneered the means to discover planets outside our solar system – all of which have yielded massive social and economic benefits for the country.
But it’s a little hard for grant funding to yield knock-on benefits when it keeps getting awarded to, say, a $32,250 report on how space exploration is “racist, exploitative, elitist, and environmentally destructive.” Or federal money for a “gender and diversity working group to promote gender-transformative mine action in Ukraine.”
The worst offender for this is the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, a federal agency tasked with handing out more than $1 billion each year to the soft sciences. The agency has always had a weakness for questionable esoteria, but in recent years SSHRC has been a major financier of Canadian academia’s obsession with all things race and gender. In the Trudeau era, the agency has become quite open about the fact they see their job as furthering the cause of “equity, diversity and inclusion.”
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation went through the last seven years of SHHRC awards to pull out some of the more egregious examples. The National Post’s own shortlist is below. Given that SHHRC hands out more than 5,000 awards per year, the eight cited below represent about half a day’s worth of SHHRC funding.
Trapped in the Wrong World: Transgender and Paranormal Phenomena
$60,000
This award went to the University of Toronto’s Valley Weadick (aka Valley WeeDick), a performance artist and self-taught illustrator who goes by they/them pronouns. As an online biography states, Weadick’s three-year probe will “examine expressions of supernatural, paranormal, and otherworldly phenomena as a means of understanding the self, the body, gender, and the world.”
The topic isn’t all that different from the 657 other researchers who, along with Weadick, had their doctoral fellowships awarded in late 2021. Also funded that year was “Queer/Women/Archive: Cinema and Trans-Historic World Building” ($40,000) and “Can randomly selected citizens help create stronger climate policy in Canada?” ($80,000).
Playing for Pleasure: The Affective Experience of Sexual and Erotic Video Games
$50,000
In a surprise to few, the internet is utterly adrift with X-rated video games. And this study pledges to find as many of them as possible. “By examining how and why players seek out erotic and pornographic video games, and analyzing how these games make them feel, I will initiate a fresh way of thinking about how our intimate lives are changing with technology,” reads an outline by author Jean Ketterling.
The supervisor for the project was Ummni Khan, a Carleton University associate professor specializing in “deviant sexuality.” Khan’s other grad students include one studying “rope bondage,” and another whose thesis examined “sexual violence and sexual Pleasure in Canadian law and life.”
Cart-ography: tracking the birth, life and death of an urban grocery cart, from work product to work tool
$105,000
The six-figure award for this project was granted under a scholarship named after Joseph-Armand Bombardier, inventor of the snowmobile and founder of the aerospace and transportation company that bears his name. Although it’s safe to say his eponymous government scholarship isn’t quite as concerned with applied engineering as he was.
The shopping cart study was among 430 applicants to also be given $105,000 research grants in the fall of 2018 – for a one-time total of $45 million. These included “The sociopragmatic functions of uh and um” and “Gendering Joseph Haydn’s Late Oratorios.”
The recipient for this grant, Simon Fraser University’s Kate Elliott, did her master’s thesis on “informal recyclers” – binners, essentially. And her postdoctoral research seems to zero in on the most common tool of the informal recycler: The stolen shopping cart. As Elliott’s SFU biography states, she aimed to explore “the relationships between carts and the humans who design, assemble, use and repurpose them.”
Re-visioning yoga and yoga bodies: Expanding modes of embodiment with non-normative bodies
$90,000
Yoga practitioners are too thin, too tall, too fit, too heterosexual and – generally – too rich, declares this study, conducted through the University of Guelph. As such, researcher Aly Bailey promises to design a “decolonized and inclusive yoga curriculum with non-normatively embodied people.” Bailey used to work as a yoga instructor and says in an online biography that she found the whole system “exclusionary” and “designed to serve heteronormative women who are white, thin, tall, hyperflexible, and in the middle and upper classes.”
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Queer stories of death-related grief: A narrative inquiry
$74,300
There’s already a fair bit of research on how gay people grieve as compared to straight people. A cursory look through the literature reveals everything from 2017’s Same-Sex Partner Bereavement: Non-HIV-Related Loss and New Research Directions, to the 2013 paper Disenfranchised grief among lesbian and gay bereaved individuals. In 2020, Swedish researchers even founded the new discipline of Queer Death Studies.
But in 2022, Canada decided to fund its own four-member team to take another look at what queer bereavement looks like. The money came from SSHRC’s Insight Development Grants program. Also included in the program’s 2022 roster was $54,750 to study “Life in (and beyond) underwater hotels,” $62,499 for “Living in Poverty: A Virtual Reality Simulated Experience” and $65,930 for “Queering later life physical activity.”
The Intersection of Xenophobia, White Supremacy, and Colonialism in the 2019 Dismissal of Don Cherry: A Critical Discourse Analysis
$17,500.00
Sports commentator Don Cherry was fired in late 2019 from his longstanding position at Hockey Night in Canada. The stated cause was Cherry telling immigrants to wear Remembrance Day poppies. “You people … that come here … you love our way of life. You love our milk and honey. At least you can pay a couple bucks for a poppy or something like that,” he said. Cherry’s longtime co-host Ron MacLean would publicly endorse the dismissal, calling the statement “hurtful, discriminatory” and “flat out wrong.”
But according to the 100-page thesis that this grant yielded, the statements were also totems of “racial xenophobia” and “hegemonic masculinity.” “I chose to focus this thesis on the normalization of white supremacy through sports,” writes Brock University’s Jessica Falk in an introduction.
The thesis is 31,000 words. So, about 56 cents per word. And in a conclusion, Falk writes that more research is needed to determine how capitalism can also be blamed for Cherry’s comments. “Capitalism remains one of the driving institutions fueling contemporary expressions of patriarchy, masculinity, racism, and settler colonialism,” she wrote.
Advancing the accurate identification of transgender individuals in forensic anthropology
$35,000.00
This is a touchy research subject of late. Male and female skeletons are materially different, so one of the first things any anthropologist will do with prehistoric bones is to figure out the sex of whoever they belonged to. But this conflicts with modern notions of gender as a fluid social construct that has no basis whatsoever to someone’s physical anatomy.
So, the University of Toronto’s Jenna Schall was given $35,000 to add to an ever-expanding body of literature on how to appropriately determine the pronouns of ancient skeletons (and oddly, the area of research was listed as “violence” in the application).
In 2020, Schall published Breaking the binary: The identification of trans-women in forensic anthropology.The synopsis is a little hard to understand, but it argues that trans people sometimes have surgery to change the shape of their face. As such, “forensic anthropologists should consider individuals who do not fit into the traditional sex binary when assessing the sex of unidentified skeletal remains.”
Placing science: implementing feminist, Indigenous, and decolonial theories of place and land in the laboratory
$293,633
Max Liboiron is the author of the book Pollution is Colonialism and an associated professor at Memorial University in Newfoundland.
Starting in 2017, Liboiron was given nearly $300,000 to develop a marine science laboratory rooted in “feminist and anti-colonial practice.” The result was the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research, a specialist in the new field of “anti-colonial science.” In a 2020 profile. Liboiron said that before her students take a single sample or make a single observation, they are coached up on how “colonialism is compared with other bad things, and understanding the difference between colonialism and capitalism.”
A project outline filed to SHHRC opened by declaring that the scientific method is a myth, and that real science could only be conducted through “Decolonial feminist place-based protocols.”
“Rather than start with universal standards, methods, and categories, we will create place and Land-based scientific protocols based in feminist, Decolonial and Indigenous theory,” it reads, adding “our overall goal is to significantly decolonize science by making place-based methods the ‘new normal.’”
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