Canadian Discrimination

Navdeep Bains, Canada’s minister of innovation, science and economic development at a meeting with law students at the University of Windsor, declared:

“One of the issues I hear from people is, ‘Well, we just don’t have the people. We don’t have the talent. We don’t have the women. We don’t have the diversity in our corporation. We would love to promote diversity but we just can’t find the people. That’s a bunch of bullshit.”

Bains said there were many “successful women – entrepreneurs, business leaders, community leaders – who want to sit on corporate boards, who are very talented and looking for the opportunity. The problem is they aren’t part of the golf network; they’re not part of the club network, the social networks that a lot of these boards exist and operate under.”

Anthony Lacavera noted in a 2017 book titled How We Can Win, “We value our diversity and openness to newcomers but our business culture is inward-looking and xenophobic.”

Women make up 12% of the directors at companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange while visible minorities make up 4.5% of company directors in the country’s top 500 companies, according to Toronto’s Women in Capital Markets. A report published last year by Deloitte Canada noted that women occupy just 35% of managerial positions across the country.