This article in the National Post, in an oblique way, highlights my problems with the way the Canadian Constitution is becoming to be interpreted (I'm still trying to get my thoughts together in a coherent form on this larger issue). The Federal Government is spending $900 million dollars to create 2000 university "chairs" to "augment [Canada]'s knowledge-based economy". The "problem" is that only 15% of the chairs so far have been awarded to women. There is no evidence that this is because of discrimination happening against individual women, rather, 80% of the seats are reserved for the sciences, and the sciences in university tend to have a lot more men than women in them. A similar program for the humanities is awarding 61% of the seats to women. A suggested solution for this is "target numbers" (A/K/A "quotas") for women. The problem with this is that as individuals men and women will now have to be treated unequally to make the quotas for their groups.

I will note that 85% of the spaces being awarded to men is a good reason to examine whether sexism (or "buddyism") is a problem in awarding these chairs, but in and of itself, it is not evidence that such is happening.

The report was authored by a Dr. Wendy Roberts, who by doing a little googling, is very ideological about these matters. She's a professor of Women's Studies at UNB, and into rehashed Marxist nonsense such as Pay Equity, making sure O Canada refers to genders correctly, and whatnot. If you believe in "pay equity", the results of this study were inevitable (one might also say: rigged) -- society is to be governed by quota, not merit, work, and ambition. Roberts is also the co-founder of PAR-L, a feminist mailing list. Strangely, Robbins has no problem that 100% of the PAR-L team is female. Some animals are more equal than others, I suppose.

I also tend to think this statement by Robbins is inherently bigoted: ""This is a really important program, and women want our fair share. Women researchers ask different questions than men, and we need to make sure that way of looking at the world is protected". This puts me far out of step with what appears to be the current opinion of society, that people should be assumed to think as per the group that they've be assigned to rather than to think as individuals.

If the government is going to spend $900 million on augmenting our "knowledge based economy", it is key that we get the best people for our money: not the ones that please fringe ideologues. Otherwise, our money has just been wasted.