Canada’s federal research funding agency is shelling out taxpayer dollars on studies that critics say are bizarre, irrelevant, and wasteful. From grocery carts to selfies, Peruvian rock music to gender equity bicycles, Ottawa is spending millions on projects that have little obvious benefit to Canadians.The Canadian Taxpayers Federation reviewed government records and highlighted dozens of unusual grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, which costs taxpayers over $1 billion a year. The SSHRC claims its funding provides “insights on the issues that matter most to Canadians,” but the CTF says many projects fall far short.“Studies about grocery carts, selfies, online Harry Potter fan communities and intersectional piano curriculums don’t sound like studies that matter most to Canadians,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “The government could have given Bubbles from Trailer Park Boys a couple pepperoni sticks for a report about grocery carts rather than billing taxpayers six figures.”.Among the most unusual grants, SSHRC spent $105,000 on a 2018 study tracking “the birth, life and death of an urban grocery cart” at Simon Fraser University. Seven years later, the report is still not complete. A 2022 study on the “gender politics of Peruvian rock music” at the University of British Columbia received $20,000. Its author plans to curate an exhibition as part of her doctoral dissertation, claiming her findings “cannot be presented in a written text alone.”Other grants include $94,000 for a 2018 study on “the rhetoric of the selfie,” exploring topics like “fat fashion photography on Instagram” and “social justice selfies,” and $21,000 for a 2019 study called We Are All Astronauts, which focused on speculative futures such as ecotopias and dystopias.The CTF also noted dozens of other projects, including: Cycling Towards Change: Advancing Mobility Justice, Gender Equity, and Sustainable Development through Bicycles ($24,500), Fat Chair: Thickening Design Standards through Fat Studies ($58,000), Learning From Ice ($50,000), and Are Kinksters Doing It Better? Gaining Insights on Sexual Wellbeing from Kink Community Members to Promote Flourishing ($73,786).“Researchers are getting buckets of cash from taxpayers and they still can’t get their homework done,” said Terrazzano. “The SSHRC seems to be little more than a slush fund so academics can work on their pet projects that nobody reads.”.The SSHRC’s spending is in addition to the $17 billion Ottawa transfers annually to the provinces for post-secondary education, social services and childcare, and provincial education spending like Alberta’s $6.6 billion this year.The CTF said the records illustrate a long-running pattern of what it calls “absurd and wasteful spending” on research that few Canadians would recognize as a priority.
