‘Intentions are not enough anymore’: BlackNorth Initiative gets commitments from 200 CEOs

In recent weeks, Canadian corporations have been eager to tout their targets for boosting the representation of Black and indigenous people in leadership roles. For the founder of a new movement aiming to combat anti-Black racism in corporate Canada, it’s about time.

“The switch only flipped a few weeks ago,” Wes Hall, chairman of the BlackNorth Initiative, told the Financial Post in an interview, noting that even companies that have had such internal targets in the past had done little to promote them, in some cases even to their own rank and file employees.

“They certainly weren’t doing anything to push it forward,” he said.

On Monday, BlackNorth announced that more than 200 CEOs of Canadian companies and organizations have signed a pledge committing to specific actions and targets designed to end anti-Black systemic racism.

“There’s been some progress but we haven’t done a good enough job,” said Hall’s BlackNorth co-chair Rola Dagher, who is also chief executive of Cisco Canada. “We’ve failed the Black community.”

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Dagher said she is encouraged by Monday’s commitment from the CEOs across a broad range of industries including financial services, education, extractive industries, professional services, healthcare, online services, consulting and manufacturing.

The signatories include the heads of nearly 30 per cent of companies that make up the TSX 60, as well as small and medium-size companies and private firms.

“Words and intentions are not enough anymore,” Dagher said, adding that corporations are recognizing they need to set goals and track and measure progress.

“Diversity is not a box you check — it’s actually action,” she said.

Diversity on corporate boards and in senior management has been a priority in Canada over the past few years, but the focus has largely been on gender diversity.

A regulatory “comply-or-explain regime” across Canada requires companies to disclose the number of women in their ranks and plans to retain and promote them, or explain why they don’t have such policies in place.

Hall said BlackNorth, the group he founded in June to support the development of programs and initiatives to remove systemic barriers negatively affecting the lives of Black Canadians, plans to borrow heavily from the playbook used to get more women on to corporate boards and in to senior management roles “to see if we can get some of the same results.”

The percentage of women on boards in Canada increased to 27 per cent in 2018 from 13 per cent in 2011, according to a report last year from TD Economics.

Hall, founder and executive chairman of shareholder services firm Kingsdale Advisors, points to research from McKinsey & Co. that shows both gender and ethnic diversity improve company performance and create a competitive edge.

The consultancy published a study in 2015 that showed gender-diverse companies were 15 per cent more likely to outperform the national industry median, while ethnically diverse companies were 35 per cent more likely to outperform.

The Canadian government has set the wheels in motion to provide more transparency on diversity within corporations through recent amendments to the Canada Business Corporations Act. Businesses that are regulated federally under the act must now report annually on the number of women, indigenous people, persons with disabilities and members of visible minorities on their boards and in senior management.

A Financial Post analysis in June of some of the earliest reports from 23 companies, with 235 directors on their combined boards, revealed that 5.5 per cent of directors in the sample identified as belonging to a visible minority. There were three indigenous directors.

Prem Watsa, chief executive of Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd. and another co-chair of the BlackNorth Initiative, said searching out and promoting people from underrepresented groups including the Black community is good for business.

“Talent is not limited to white people or women. It’s everybody — it’s just that we never looked for it,” Watsa said during a panel discussion Monday at BlackNorth’s inaugural summit in Toronto.

During the discussion, he read from an Ontario government report in the early 1990s that used the term “anti-black racism” and said it is “inappropriate” that this still exists some 30 years later. The often publicity-shy Watsa added that racism should be a potential firing offence, just as the inappropriate treatment of women has become in the #MeToo era.

Victor Dodig, chief executive of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and the third co-chair of the BlackNorth Initiative, also participated in Monday’s panel discussion.

An early advocate for a greater number of women on corporate boards and in senior management, Dodig said more inclusive companies are desirable for society and also fulfill “an economic imperative” by tapping into all available talent.

“We need to continue to advance inclusion but we also need to act with urgency to end anti-Black systemic racism, because any tolerance for it diminishes the progress we’re making in other areas,” Dodig told the Post.