Academic inbreeding is a label used when units, departments and universities hire their former students, predominantly their former Ph.D. students, as faculty members, a practice that is generally perceived as detrimental to academic productivity and diversity. In this paper, for the first time, we attempt to verify some of the reported attributes for a small sample of Canadian universities, namely for the largest engineering schools. We examined more than 60 departments and units at 11 universities. We show that academic inbreeding is in fact present at the investigated units with a national average of 23%. Twelve departments exhibited a Z-score of one (inbreeding index larger than 34%, four departments showed a Z-score score of almost 2 and higher (inbreeding index larger than 44%). As well, we demonstrate that the quality of publications, measured by the number citations, appears to be lower for the inbreds. We also introduce a new measure that seems to be more suitable to capture the negative effect of inbreeding on diversity.