From grocery carts to selfies, Peruvian rock music to gender equity bicycles: Canada’s federal research grants are funding some unusual and irrelevant research projects, according to government records dug up by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

“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 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.”

The federal government’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council costs taxpayers more than $1 billion a year. The SSHRC “supports research and research training in the social sciences and humanities.” The government claims the SSHRC-funded studies provide “insights on the issues that matter most to Canadians.”

The CTF reviewed thousands of pages of federal grants and identified countless obscure studies that aren’t priorities for most Canadians — including “learning from ice,” and “gender equity” in bicycling.

The SSHRC spent $105,000 on a study examining the life cycle of a grocery cart in 2018, according to the government’s website.  Cart-ography: tracking the birth, life and death of an urban grocery cart, from work product to work tool was led by Kate Elliot of Simon Fraser University. Elliot’s work documents “the relationships between carts and the humans who design, assemble, use and repurpose them.”

After seven years and all that funding, the report isn’t done. Elliot is still working on the grocery cart’s life cycle study as part of her doctoral research, according to SFU’s website.

The government also dished out $20,000 on a study called Gender politics of Peruvian rock music in 2022. Fabiola Bazo’s work at the University of British Columbia is “informed by the feminist and queer perspectives” and “theorizes music as an extension of sensual/sexual practices and dynamics of power.”

Bazo plans to curate “an exhibition as part of (her) doctoral dissertation.” She claims that presenting findings “is impossible in a written text alone.”

The government spent $94,000 on a study entitled Rhetoric of the selfie in 2018. The study, led by Aimée Morrison of the University of Waterloo, is “grounded in the politics and narratives of self-representation online.”

The study includes “fat fashion photography on Instagram,” “social justice selfies” and selfies that “violate social norms.” Morrison previously took $58,000 in 2011 through the SSHRC.

“Basically, I fart around on the internet for most of my teaching and research,” Morrison said.

Taxpayers also unwittingly paid $21,000 for a study called, We Are All Astronauts in 2019, led by Sarah Smith of Carleton University and Kirsty Robertson of Western University. It focuses on “speculative futures” including “ecotopias,” “utopias” and “dystopias.”

The CTF couldn’t unearth a published report from Smith and Robertson based on the funding. However, the researchers did co-curate an exhibition called The Air of the Now and Gone at Carleton in 2025. This exhibition was about how to “move forward” in what they call the “wicked problem” of climate change. 

“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.”

The SSHRC’s $1 billion annual cost is in addition to the $17 billion the federal government sends to the provinces through the Canada Social Transfer every year. The CST is the federal transfer to the provinces for “post-secondary education, social assistance and social services,

and early childhood development and early learning and childcare.” The SSHRC’s spending is also in addition to what provincial governments spend on post-secondary education every year. For example, the Alberta government will spend $6.6 billion on advanced and post-secondary education this year.

 The CTF has identified dozens of wacky SSHRC research grants, 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)

●      Nostalgia for the Non-Existent: Musical Nostalgia for Fictional Pasts in Video Games ($27,000)

●      The Erotics of Rule-Following in British Romanticism ($93,000)

●      Learning From Ice ($50,000)

●      She's Still Sounding: Working towards a gender inclusive and intersectional piano curriculum ($17,500)

●      Teens' self-fashioning of sexual and gender identities in online Harry Potter fan communities ($7,778)

●      Disgraced Former Rodeo Princesses ($17,500)

●      Investigating Barriers to Birth Registration Among Labour Migrant Families in the Malaysian Palm Oil Sector ($35,300)

●      Are Kinksters Doing It Better? Gaining Insights on Sexual Wellbeing from Kink Community Members to Promote Flourishing ($73,786)

●      Playing for Pleasure: The Affective Experience of Sexual and Erotic Video Games ($50,000)

●      Re-visioning yoga and yoga bodies: Expanding modes of embodiment with non-normative bodies ($45,000)