THUNDER BAY – Making decisions without evidence-based research is often a shot in the dark, suggests Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Labour Patty Hajdu.
It’s why the current Liberal government is spending more than $265 million to support study in both social sciences and the humanities.
On Friday, Hajdu spent about an hour speaking with several Lakehead University researchers, beneficiaries of nearly $900,000 in Social Science and Humanities Research Council grants, $776,978 of which came in the latest round of funding.
“When we have a good body of evidence, when we have researchers that are studying things as broad as climate change, domestic violence and diversity in employment, ensuring that underrepresented groups like Indigenous people have access to employment, those are the kinds of things that can make my job as a politician and other politicians’ jobs much easier because we actually have a body of evidence to draw on,” Hajdu said.
The Lakehead projects, announced earlier this year, include $305,000 to assistant anthropology professor Matt Tocheri for a five-year project looking at pre-modern and modern humans. Lindsay Galway, an assistant professor in health sciences, got $54,478 and will spend the next two years looking at how to communicate climate-change impacts and solutions to promote citizen engagement.
Her project will concentrate on a pair of Canadian communities, Thunder Bay and Prince George, B.C.
Galway said it’s important to have a government that supports scientific research.
“How do we make decisions if we don’t have support for our science and our research and if we don’t have the funding to develop the evidence,” Galway said.
“It is a foundation of our society and we can’t have a prosperous, healthy society that can live through and progress in great directions in the context of climate change if we’re not respecting and listening to science and scientists.
Other projects included $200,000 to partner with the Nokiiwin Tribal Council to look at Indigenous participation in the labour force and the obstacles they face and $24,715 to study comparative approaches to culture-based tourism in Canada and Ecuador.
Several graduate students also received grants, including Jennifer White, who got $17,500 to further her research into toxic masculinity and violence prevention in Northwestern Ontario, and Kelsey Raynard, who will receive a similar grant to focusing on reclaiming girl power in a patriarchal world.
