Merit and the imported culture war

University admissions and Ontario's Bill 33

Jun 06, 2025

Globe and Mail Headline reading: Ontario Bill 33 undermines university autonomy and access to education, critics say. Byline: Joe Friesen Postsecondary Education Reporter Published June 3, 2025

Bill 33, introduced at Queen’s Park last week, contains provisions that would require universities and colleges to assess applicants for admission based on merit and to publish the criteria on which students will be judged.1

Readers of this Globe and Mail article might be forgiven for a certain amount of puzzlement. Why, exactly, are the “critics” mad about merit-based admissions and clearly communicated criteria? And also, what dire things must the the colleges and universities in Canada be doing if this needs to be made a law? Surely something nefarious.

Let us quickly set that worry to rest. Admissions decisions for undergraduate study at Canadian colleges and universities are in almost all cases remarkably simple. Are you an Alberta high school student who wants to study Philosophy? Toronto Metropolitan University requires a completed high school diploma, English Language Arts 30-1, and four other courses numbered 30 or 31.2 Want to stay closer to home? University of Calgary requires the same number of courses, but with the additional restriction that only one Fine Arts class can be used.3 UCalgary also helpfully shares that the estimated competitive GPA is mid 70s. What does that mean?

Once admissions close, each of these universities is going to sort the applicants to each degree program by GPA4, and start admitting them from the top down until the program is full. Currently if you want to study Psychology at UCalgary that full point will be reached in the low 90s, due the very high demand. Philosophy is easier to get into because fewer students want to study it.5

Once you turn to professional programs like law schools and medical schools, as well as graduate programs of all sorts, things look a little different. Partly this is because even if these programs were to set their admission requirements at the highest possible GPA for undergraduate studies, they would still have too many applicants. You need some other way to choose. But it is also because different programs do different things. Suppose you want to get a PhD in Philosophy, and you want to focus on bioethics. If you apply to UCalgary and we admit you based on GPA alone you are going to be very disappointed, because we don’t have any specialists in bioethics who could supervise a dissertation in that area.6 So if you are applying for a PhD we are going to ask for a research statement explaining what you want to do, and a writing sample to help us compare you to all the other high achieving applicants, and reference letters to speak to the skills you need to survive a PhD program, like initiative and independence.

What about that culture war, you ask, having snoozed off in the meantime. You may have noticed that the federal government of our Southern Neighbour has gone to war against universities claiming bad unamerican things are being done under the name “DEI” in everything from admissions to research projects. And while this culture war is intellectually incoherent and in many cases morally abhorrent, the rhetoric no doubt speaks to deep seated anxieties among US parents and aspiring college students. Admissions to US universities is notoriously opaque and the criteria far more complicated than the Canadian norm—so much so that in 2019 a bunch of wealthy parents went to jail for creating phony sports careers for their teenagers.7 Moreover the perceived quality of US post-secondaries varies far more than it does here, which makes getting in the right school seem more urgent. So there is an appetite for right-wing claims that their precious children are being kept out of the college of their dreams because someone else “took their spot”.

Bill 33 lets Doug Ford’s PC government turn to those of their voters who are most influenced by Fox News and other media organs of the American right and reassure them that their Ontario government will not stand for any of that nonsense up here, even though neither the voters nor Ford can clearly explain what that nonsense is, exactly, or even point to anything Ontario’s universities are doing that they object to. Indeed when asked for comment the office of the Minister responsible in Ontario told the Globe and Mail that:

To be clear, there will always be pathways for those with disabilities and other underrepresented groups, and the consultations will help ensure we are increasing transparencies around these policies to make it easier for students to apply.

So to the extent that there are any admissions policies that aim at equity and inclusion in Ontario universities, the Ford government wants them to remain in place and be more publicized.

The Ontario government then, is telling Ontario universities to do something they already do, perhaps in order to reassure voters that something bad which they have heard is happening in the US will not happen here.

Still, if Ontario universities already use clearly communicated merit-based criteria for admissions, why are academics so mad? Partly it’s because once a government gives themselves a power it becomes a temptation for them to use it. Right now the Minister says alternate pathways are fine, but what if they change their minds. What if they demand admission criteria that the programs themselves think are inappropriate. The provincial government has no expertise in the myriad of skills, knowledge, and capacities that can be relevant to assessing the suitability of applicants for a specific program. Nor do they necessarily understand the communities various post-secondary institutions serve.

When this new first dropped an acquaintance of mine’s immediate response was to suggest this was about TMU’s alternative admission pathways for medical school. TMU’s Medical School is specifically focused on family doctors, with a mandate to prioritize students who will practice medicine in the Brampton/Peel region. No matter how high their undergraduate GPA, how extensive their non-academic experience, an aspiring heart surgeon who wants to work and live in Vancouver is a bad fit for TMU. That is not the doctor that TMUs community needs them to train.

Every medical student admitted to TMU has to meet the same academic requirements — a four year degree with a minimum GPA. Every student is also asked to speak to their connection to and interest in working in the Brampton/Peel region after graduation. Every student is also asked to identify whether they are applying via the general admissions stream, the indigenous admissions stream, the black admissions stream, or the equity-deserving groups stream.

Why have such streams? One answer, with a great deal of truth to it, is that our traditional ways of assessing merit, especially in high demand programs, often exclude genuinely meritorious candidates through no fault of their own. Some of those aspiring UCalgary psychology students with high school averages lower than the mid-90s would do better in their future careers than some of the students actually admitted precisely because of the experiences they had that got in the way of a 95% average. That’s why TMU medical school looks at volunteer experience, and connections to the region, and reference letters, and so on. And we know that students from the communities picked out by these streams are more likely to have faced obstacles and had experiences that might give them a lower GPA but also make them a better doctor.

But the more important answer is because the communities in Brampton/Peel region deserve to have doctors (and teachers, and lawyers, and so on) who reflect and have real lived experience of their communities. A family doctor has to treat the whole patient. They are not looking into a microsope at a petrie dish—that’s the laboratory techs job. Nor are they taking out the tumor—that’s the surgeon’s job. They have to figure out how what is happening in the petrie dish impacts the patient, and how to help them navigate this illness, how to recover post surgery, and so on. Or they have to help the parent figure out what a diagnosis of a learning disability means for their kid, and help them navigate schools, and extended family, and so on. The communities in the Brampton/Peel region, including the black and indigenous communities, support the medical school through their taxes, and they do not have enough family doctors. One way to solve that problem is to train doctors that come from those communities.

Every student admitted in every pathway meets the minimum academic requirements needed to succeed in medical school. They all merit admission. But there aren’t enough spots for them all. Starting at the top of the GPA ranking and working down has the advantage of being simple to understand. But it doesn’t help Brampton/Peel get more doctors. No one knows what the Ontario government thinks “merit” consists in, but to the extent that this bill is a product of the manufactured culture war down south we shouldn’t expect it to result in more doctors either.

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