Targeting systemic racism
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, said 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.”
Dagher said she is encouraged by Monday’s commitment from the dozens of CEOS across a broad range of industries including financial services, education, extractive industries, professional services, health care, 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-sized 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 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 onto corporate boards and into senior management roles “to see if we can get some of the same results.”