Speech: Amendments to Bill C-25, An Act to Amend the Canada Business Corporations Act and Other Acts

Hon. Ratna Omidvar: Honourable senators, I rise today, too, to support the amendment tabled by my colleague Senator Massicotte and to thank Senator Massicotte, Senator Moncion and others who will come after me who have paid attention and engaged on this issue.

I think it is also important to thank Senator Wetston, who is the sponsor of this bill, who has worked with us and who delivered a really excellent third reading speech in spite of being not quite as well as he would have wanted to be.

Bill C-25, I’ve always believed and continue to believe, is a good piece of legislation, but good intentions are often not enough to drive us to where we want to go.

As I have said repeatedly, I think of Bill C-25 as a soft tap on the shoulder. This amendment that Senator Massicotte has proposed is a nudge in the right direction. It’s an intentional nudge, so that we can get beyond aspiration — and I commend the aspiration and the intention in this bill — and take it to concrete action.

I do not want to repeat all of the facts and the information and the evidence and the arguments that my two colleagues have put before us. Instead, I want to bring a new perspective and add value as I can.

I believe that there is something new in the discourse today, and we know that there is the growing voice of women on matters that concern them.

There are many who think that, if Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters, the narrative of the financial markets in 2008 may well have been different.

I also think that if there were more women, minorities, indigenous peoples and people with disabilities on boards, regardless of whether they are corporate, I believe there would be a stronger check on bad behaviour that seems to be growingly associated with positions of power and privilege.

 This amendment does not ask anyone to climb Mount Everest. It asks for targets, the targets are voluntary, the corporations can say set these according to their own history, their own context, their own region and their own industry. This is common business practice. Business sets targets to know where they are going so they can evaluate their progress. Therefore I don’t think this is a terribly out-of-the-box idea to ask businesses to set targets and put intentions behind them.

Wendy Cukier, from the Diversity Institute , said at committee, “the advantage of using targets is that they are flexible and they allow us to adapt.”

Sarah Kaplan, from the Institute for Gender and the Economy at the Rotman School of Business said:

. . . the bill in its current form only requires firms to report whether or not they have targets. My fear is that this voluntary approach will not move us beyond the 11 per cent that report having targets now.  I suggest that it would usefully include a requirement that firms set and report targets rather than just explaining why they don’t.

Targets are valuable because they give citizens and shareholders a means for holding firms accountable.

In addition, as Senator Massicotte said, this amendment would help us understand where we are making progress, by requiring corporations to further report out to the director of corporations who would then be required to do an aggregate reporting, not how the Royal Bank is doing or how the Bank of Nova Scotia is doing but how, let’s say, the country is doing, how corporate governance in the country is doing; and further, possibly, how corporate governance in the mining sector, or in the financial sector, or in the consumer sector is doing. It gives you a baseline to understand where you’ve come from and to appreciate where you’re going, and it provides context.

I want to say a few words, once again, about diversity and the lens we are using to view diversity. I understand, I appreciate and I’m a strong proponent for gender equity, but gender equity is not the sum of diversity. I fear that if we do not appreciate the intersections between gender and race, gender and ability and gender and indigenous status that all these other excluded groups will be a very poor second cousin in this context.

Finally, I want to say a few words to Senator Wetston’s very compelling argument about consistency and the myriad of institutions, systems and structures that occupy the corporate world, and I don’t discount the complexity of navigating all of these structures and systems and adding something more on top. However, I do believe that the federal government has a special responsibility to lead, to set the tone where others will follow. I do believe that the federal government has a higher bar to respond to and that is a bar of nation building.

Two nights ago, we heard a lot about nation building and I was struck by our commitment to ensuring the future of this whole nation, not parts of it, but the whole nation, not parts of demographic groups but all of us.

I will say that just as 1995 was the year for employment equity, and I will continue to insist and believe that if there have been legislative measures that have built our nation, employment equity has a very proud role and status in this narrative because it was that piece of legislation that changed the narrative of our country, especially from the point of view of excluded groups. So just as 1995 was the year for employment equity, I will suggest that 2018 is the year for governance equity. If not now, then when? If not us, then who?

Thank you very much.