Thread by @caparsons

Ottawa imposes national security risk assessments for university researchers seeking federal funds theglobeandmail.com/politics/artic…

This announcement has the potential to really gum up academic research protocols by disincentivizing researchers from doing certain classes of work in Canada due to adding bureaucracy or fear of security review and its consequences.

Funding in Canada is often hard to come by and so researchers are naturally disincentivized from publicly complaining about problems in obtaining funding. But they do talk quietly and create whisper communities of ‘problem funders’.

As soon as some research is blocked by NSERC/CSIS there will be a risk that scientists start seeing federal funds as for either nationalistic or ‘safe’ research projects. Those doing work that could be disallowed by CSIS will get funding from alternate sources, instead.

University faculty & scholars do not just rely on federal funds, but also international & private funding. In creating barriers to receiving federal funding—where accountability & audits could be maintained—this policy could limit how the government can assess research funding.

In excess of ‘what will this mean for monitoring Canadian scholars’ research’, adding security checks to research processes runs the serious risk of further enhancing perceptions (and, potentially, realities) of biases in who is funded.

Scholars tend to build international networks that often are reflective of where they did degrees, linguistic communities, etc. So where excellent scholars of Chinese descent are in Canada they may tend to work with other, excellent, scholars who work from China.

Are those scholars more likely to be subject to monitoring for ‘national security’ reasons, as compared to Caucasian Canadian scholars who predominantly have North American and European collaborators? (Answer: almost certainly.)

Furthermore, numerous Canadian communities have disproportionately been targeted by the national security community, such as those affiliated with Canada’s Muslim communities. What does it mean for them & their students to be subject to natsec assessment for research funding?

I very, very much hope that at an absolute minimum @nsiracanada and/or @NSICOPCanada monitor & audit these national security assessments *very* carefully. But that’s not really enough: the funding councils + CSIS will need to be totally transparent in what they’re doing, and why.

I have to admit that I’m not super confident that this will happen, based on how the funding councils have often provided explanations for why certain research has been barred, or in how CSIS publicly defends some of the decisions it does.