I’ve already written about parallel crises in Canadian higher education funding, anti-male discrimination, and even relevance. But there may be a much scarier monster bearing down on the research wings of academic institutions - and the disruption could be epic.
First though, we should list some of the vulnerabilities facing an industry that’s worth $19 billion1 annually in Canada.
By their nature, even the best academic disciplines accumulate jargon, methodological silos, and citation networks that make it hard for any one researcher to know what's happening two fields over. Even good researchers will struggle to avoid big-picture errors where untested assumptions quietly make their way into otherwise credible work.
The sheer volume of papers on any single topic - and the collapsing peer review system - make in easy for gross errors and non-replicable findings to make it through to publication. And from there, it’s a quick journey to “settled science”
Besides honest errors, there’s a “venerable” academic tradition of fabricating data, p-hacking, and selective reporting. Not to mention libraries full of useless, unoriginal “research” and outright plagiarism. It can be nearly impossible to find genuine value inside databases of literature that have been poisoned by such garbage.
None of that is new: those are all problems that have been compounding for decades. What is new is:
There’s a growing demand for serious reform coming from the inside the academy
Artificial intelligence tools are increasingly available to identify bad research at scale
After all, AI systems can effortlessly account for the full content of millions of papers - regardless of discipline. That makes them unusually good at spotting both redundant and contradictory research.
AI tooling has already been widely used to catch fabricated data, doctored images, p-hacking, and selective reporting. Once those tools are set loose against hundreds of thousands of published papers, they’re almost certainly going to uncover problematic patterns. And given how AI models can (hopefully) be relied on to ignore in-group loyalties and career-oriented incentive structures, those problems will quickly come to light.
Naturally, a healthy scientific community would embrace the use of such tools as an opportunity to voluntarily policy their work. Sadly, I haven’t seen much evidence of that happening here in Canada.
But given how accessible AI engines are, it’s only a matter of time before someone else independently lights the match on the great unraveling. I’m trying to visualize how that might look.
To a large degree, academic institutions are, themselves, incapable of responding appropriately:
Flagging thousands of published papers as statistically suspicious doesn’t automatically translate to thousands of dismissals. At best, it would lead to investigations, most of which stall.
Revealing how a particular field has been promoting sub-standard research standards for years probably won’t inspire a comprehensive cleanup: there’s simply too much reputational weight at stake.
Historically, contested fields (like parts of nutrition science, some social psychology) fought back for years before quietly - and partially - changing course.
Instead, responses to revelations of widespread fraud and incompetence will mostly come from the outside. As a result, the correction will likely look more like it was done by a sledge hammer than a surgical scalpel.
It’s not hard to imagine the public mood shifting to a place where politicians feel pressure to scale back or even eliminate entire classes of research funding. Major grant agencies could feel similar pressure to correct for previous years of poor oversight. And declining credibility at both the field and department levels could choke incoming donations - which currently make up around four percent of total revenues for Canadian universities.
Twenty years from now, we may be looking at a post secondary world that gets by on smaller budgets, hosts fewer research positions, and focuses on fewer research targets.
Overall, that sounds about right.
The risk, though, is that some of what gets lost could have changed the world in a positive way. But the fact that the research sector tolerated a situation where worthwhile research drowned in a tidal wave of garbage, made an alternative outcome impossible.
Why Does Canada "Lead" the World in Funding Racist Indoctrination?
IMPACT-se just released their Review of the 2025-2026 Palestinian Authority School Curriculum (Grades 1-12). They reviewed 290 text books and 71 teacher guides (both printed and digital) currently in use by schools charged with educating Palestinian children. The results were unambiguous:
Veterans Affairs: Research Funding
I recently published an attempt to understand how the federal government cares for our veterans. If you haven’t yet, do take a few minutes to read about how hundreds of millions of dollars travel through dizzying layers of agencies and middlemen before they’re (presumably) spent on vets.
How Global Affairs Canada Manages Research Grants to Foreign Institutions
Through the past decade, Global Affairs Canada (GAC) awarded grants worth around 31 billion dollars to the International Development Assistance Program (formerly known as CIDA). Of that funding, three billion dollars went for purposes that included the word “research” in their descriptions.
That number reflects research within academic institutions. Combined, the cost of research taking place at all levels in Canada is closer to $60 billion.