Tax dollars funding questionable academic studies: CTF
- Tony Lam
- Nov 2
- 3 min read
Re-printed without permission.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars being spent on studies examining gender politics in Peruvian rock music, and gender identities of teen Harry Potter fans
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Published Oct 30, 2025 • Last updated 2 days ago • 2 minute read
OTTAWA — While Canadians struggle with an unprecedented cost-of-living crisis, the Canadian government is doling out millions of dollars for some seemingly absurd research grants.
According to documents uncovered by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, among the over $1 billion in grants handed out by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) every year include tens, and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund research of questionable value.
According to SSHRC’s own mandate, the money handed out by the agency is meant to “inform new knowledge and insights on the issues that matter most to Canadians.”
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“Studies about grocery carts, selfies, online Harry Potter fan communities and intersectional piano curriculums don’t sound like studies that matter most to Canadians like the government claims,” said the CTF’s federal director Franco Terrazzano.
“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.”
Shopping carts and flourishing kinksters
Among the more interesting studies funded by SSHRC includes $105,000 for a 2018 Simon Fraser University study entitled Cart-ography, tracking the birth, life and death of an urban grocery cart.
The researcher’s biography highlights her doctoral research as ongoing, documenting “the life cycle of grocery carts, exposing the relationships between carts and the humans who design, assemble, use and repurpose them.”
Other questionable studies highlighted by the CTF include $73,786 for a Queen’s University study entitled Are Kinksters Doing It Better? Gaining Insights on Sexual Wellbeing from Kink Community Members to Promote Flourishing — with “flourishing” referring to the positive feelings experienced by those involved in kink lifestyles, $17,500 was awarded to a University of Ottawa researcher for a study on developing gender-inclusive and intersectional piano curriculum, and $35,300 for a UBC study investigating birth registration barriers among migrant labourers in the Malaysian palm oil industry.
Canadian tax dollars examining Peruvian rock music through intersectional lenses
$20,000 of Canadian taxpayer money was granted to a 2019 doctoral fellowship study out of UBC entitled Gender Politics in Peruvian Rock Music.
“I consider myself a scholar advocate whose goal is to advance feminist and queer interventions in Peruvian music,” the study’s author wrote on her UBC biography page, indicating she hopes her work will highlight the musical contribution of women and gender non confirming performers in the South American nation.
“In my interviews with trained women musicians, many indicated that women composers’ works were absent from the curriculum at music schools, and the existence of a discourse that naturalized their marginalization as artists that preserves a gendered aesthetic criterion and canon.”
Other SSHRC studies include $58,000 to a Carleton University research project examining how design standards exclude the obese, $7,777.80 for a study into the self-fashioning of sexual and gender identities by teens in online Harry Potter communities, and $50,000 to study “the affective experience of sexual and erotic video games.”
“Researchers are getting buckets of cash from taxpayers and they still can’t get their homework done,” Terrazzano said.
“The SSHRC seems to be little more than a slush fund so academics can work on their pet projects that nobody reads.”
X: @bryanpassifiume
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