Jeff Biggar just sent me a link to a “Petition in Support of the SSHRC.” by NDP member Niki Ashton. I was surprised to find out the following:

For more than thirty years, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) has been promoting and supporting university-based research and training in the humanities and social sciences. SSHRC funding has been used to complete ground breaking research in countless areas in Canada and around the world.

The Federal Budget presented on January 27th contains a sentence that has the potential to halt this kind of research: “Scholarships granted by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council will be focused on business-related degrees”.

These measures are backward and insulting to the thousands of Canadians that are students and researchers in the social sciences and humanities.

What?! Has anybody else heard about this? While, yes, the petition’s wording of “insulting” can apply here, it’s more thansomething personal. I’m not upset because I’m in the humanities, but because this goes directly against the beliefs and values that have brought me here. After the debacle of a free market, greed-driven culture that has collectively dug our societies a hole, you would think that we would be moving towards a softer, more humanistic approach to the society of tomorrow. SSHRC scholarships reward the brightest (hi Kathleen!), and this line in the 2009 Federal budget shows that, rather than re-evaluating the vehicle, the Canadian government is looking for smart people to get extra mileage from the broken-down jalopy. It’s the capitalist take on the old communism vs. stalinism defense: “It’s not that a democracy run on cutthroat greed doesn’t work, it’s that it hasn’t be done right yet”.