Laval University will lose its access to Canada Research Chairs (CRC) unless it rejects applications from white men for professorships that depend on this federal windfall.
It is that the administration of Université Laval is unable to meet the quotas imposed by Ottawa for women and gender minorities, who form a category, people from “racialized” minorities, Aboriginal peoples and people disabilities. The University must meet the targets by 2029, but according to CRC regulations, an institution that misses targets before the deadline cannot submit an application if the candidate is not part of the designated groups.
The quotas are not adapted to the composition of the population of Quebec or to the pool of students served by Université Laval. The targets to be reached in 2029 are essentially based on the percentage that the four target groups represent within the Canadian population as a whole, according to Statistics Canada. Thus, the quotas are set at 51% for women and gender minorities, 22% for visible minorities, 4.9% for Aboriginals and 7.5% for persons with disabilities.
This is already an incongruity since visible minorities represent less than 15% of the Quebec population, and Aboriginals, 2.5%. One might think that for a university in the Toronto region, reaching the quota for visible minorities is a formality since more than half of the city’s population falls into this category. In Quebec, it accounts for 6.4% of the population.
All Quebec universities have policies aimed at ensuring equity in the hiring of professors and the absence of discrimination. Conventionally, “for equal competence”, preference may be given to candidates from an under-represented group, starting with women. However, at Université Laval today, women represent only 38% of the teaching staff. This proportion varies from one faculty to another: women are less present in engineering and science, for example. In a university context, proportional representation is not always easy to achieve.
It should be remembered that the CRC program, launched following the narrow victory in the 1995 referendum, took on a political dimension in Quebec. One of the goals of the program is to retain the university elite and bring it closer to federal power. It was also a way for Ottawa to invest, under the guise of research, in a field of provincial jurisdiction, higher education.
In Quebec, all political parties have denounced this exclusion of candidates who do not have the right skin color. This affair raises the question of the independence of universities which agree, in exchange for hard cash, to submit to the wishes of a third party, whether it be the federal government or private enterprise. The Quebec government, which speaks to us of academic freedom, should rise up against this enslavement of our institutions.