Jamie Sarkonak: Not even Canada’s space program can escape the pull of Liberal DEI

Identity politics have worked their way into grants, hiring procedures at the Canadian Space Agency

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Published Sep 19, 2024  •  Last updated 0 minutes ago  •  4 minute read

An artist's concept of Canadarm3 on the Lunar Gateway orbiting the moon.Photo: Canadian Space Agency, NASA Photo by Canadian Space Agency, NASA

Having fully colonized Canada’s federal university research system, the totalizing force of diversity, equity and inclusion is looking to the next frontier: space.

Now approaching the end of a four-year DEI strategy implemented in 2021, the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) has adopted many of the familiar traits of an organization shying away from merit: diversity “targets” for staff, mandatory diversity training, employee groups for every demographic clade other than white men and even DEI-based grant criteria.

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Take, for example, the CSA’s “Increasing equity, diversity and inclusion in the Canadian space sector” grant, which will provide a total of $600,000 to eligible applicants until 2026. The intent? To funnel money to any student program that targets women, Indigenous persons, disabled persons and visible minorities (“particularly those from Black community”) to promote DEI in the space sector.

“Canada can do more to recognize and remedy these gaps so that our national space workforce reflects the wealth of Canada’s cultural diversity,” states the grant description.

To a lesser degree, many of the CSA’s grants include DEI in their evaluation rubrics. An International Space Station health sciences research opportunity asks applicants to explain how they intend to recruit non-white or female members, and how they intend to perform outreach to these groups. Though it only comprises five per cent of the total grade, the DEI section can’t be skipped: at minimum, applicants must include a “diversity inclusion plan” and commit to at least one outreach event. A perfect score requires the following:

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“The proposal contains a diversity inclusion plan that is fully described, with detailed information on the specific means that will be used to implement the plan (i.e., underrepresented groups that are not included currently in the team and that are targeted) and contains at least three (3) outreach activities that are well detailed and described.”

Another CSA grant program seeks to “improve our understanding of the risks of spaceflight on health of men, women, and gender diverse people,” encouraging any applying researchers to endorse gender ideology by treating biological sex and gender as separate variables. It, along with a grant opportunity to investigate the health effects of space flight has a similar criterion, requires that applicants commit to promoting diversity, either by engaging with non-white or non-male individuals, or at least performing some kind of outreach targeted at said groups.

Meanwhile, the CSA’s general space science grant program gives out extra points to any team that has at least one disabled, non-white, or female member. Under this rubric, all-male teams aren’t penalized for being culturally and ethnically homogenous unless they’re white.

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It’s not just the grant programs that have been corrupted by this new, identity-obsessed mindset. Staff demographics at the CSA became a primary objective with the release of the organization’s four-year DEI plan.

Staffing managers were told that meeting hiring quotas (closing “organizational gaps”) was part of their job. Most notably, they were expected to use “staffing actions” to close those representativeness gaps, which could include outright barring men, white people or able-bodied people from applying. Meanwhile, processes were to be introduced so that equal proportions of white and non-white applicants would be offered jobs. None of these are features of an ambitious engineering program, because they all erode away at what should be a meritocracy.

“Awareness activities” were to be organized on a monthly basis to promote discussion on social issues, and all managers were to be given anti-racism training, which usually has more to do with reversing the flow of racism than halting it. At least three committees — on diversity, women and visible minorities — were assembled to advise the organization, which in turn asked that more managers be hired from their ranks.

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It should be noted that the CSA didn’t establish any case for rampant racism and sexism for these changes. Science and engineering sectors are already quite organically diverse, and by its own count, most of the CSA’s workforce was already demographically representative of Canada. Indeed, even though hiring managers were given a broad mandate to discriminate in their favour, women are actually over-represented across all ranks — and the other groups are only a couple of percentage points away.

We can’t know just how many people were discriminated against in the course of applying for a CSA job, but we do know that doing so was encouraged among hiring managers — and that the plan was to threaten them with sub-par performance reviews if they didn’t meet quota.

This is space research cast through a Liberal government lens: innovation must always be overshadowed by the higher mission of total racial and gender equity. If that means otherwise meritorious engineers, scientists and technicians responsible for advancing Canada’s presence in space are denied critical grants and job opportunities because their teams don’t have the right genetics, or because they failed to come up with a sufficient plan to communicate their results with women and minorities, so be it.

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Unfortunately, the attitude is ubiquitous. Elsewhere in the Canadian government, the Department of National Defence has spent thousands of dollars philosophizing space social justice — that is, “patterns of entrenched gender, racial and geopolitical dominance” and even “colonial bias” in space exploration. NASA, meanwhile, has its own DEI administration.

Since the start of the space race, government-supported innovation has propelled humanity forward. Canada’s own program birthed two generations of Canadarm, the International Space Station’s Dextre space robot and various critical instruments used on Mars rovers and the James Webb Space Telescope. Given enough years under tight affirmative action mandates, could we expect it to contribute on the same level? I would think not.

National Post

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