National Post (National Edition)
Change agent of Bay Street
How Wes Hall and the BlackNorth Initiative are schooling corporate Canada on diversity
Wes Hall wears expensive suits, drives a fancy sports car, collects art and lives in a yellow-brick mansion in Toronto's exclusive Rosedale neighbourhood. He is 51, fit and buff, has five kids and a great wife, and is widely respected as a Bay Street power broker, but sometimes none of it matters.
Not when he answers the door to the mansion and a contractor asks him to go fetch “Mr. Hall.” Not when a neighbour asks if he is the security guard for the property, or mistakes him for his wife's personal trainer. And not when Hall, who is Black, has to sit his mixed-race children down for a talk about life in their wealthy enclave, and beyond, and the rules one need observe.
For example: never, ever, walk with one's hoodie pulled up after dark; always knock on the front door of a friend's house instead of going around to the side or the back; and if you get pulled over by police for no apparent reason while driving your father's Mercedes-Benz SUV through one of the wealthiest parts of Toronto, be polite, respectful, betray zero annoyance at the situation — and get home safe.
“It is absurd,” Hall said. “These are the things we teach our kids, where it would never even occur to you to teach your kids these things.”
By you, Hall means his white neighbours, and white Canada at large. A generally well-meaning, but at times oblivious bunch who often don't get it, he said, because they can't get it. They have not lived it. They have not watched the video of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and thought that could be me, or wondered is that how people see me, as some Black guy, driving through the financial district in a red Ferrari convertible that Black guys supposedly can't afford unless, well, you know?
Hall is a marquee Canadian player in shareholder proxy fights, the founder and executive chairman of Kingsdale Advisors and a wealthy man by any measure, but even he is not immune to the unseen measures, and assumptions that get made, because of his race.
“It is 2020, man, let's move on,” Hall said. “Bad stuff doesn't have to last forever. The Berlin Wall didn't last forever; nothing that oppresses people lasts forever.”
Not if Hall, and his high-powered friends, can help it.
In June, in the aftermath of the Floyd killing, with Black Lives Matter marches rippling across Canada and issues around race and racism dominating international conversation, the kid who grew up in a tin shack in Jamaica grabbed hold of the metaphorical sledgehammer and founded BlackNorth Initiative (BNI), which he believes can address systemic racism by using a “business-first mindset” to create more opportunities for Black people in corporate Canada.
The current numbers offer a damning portrait of the status quo. For example: 7.5 per cent of Toronto's residents are Black, but just 0.3 per cent of corporate board positions are held by Black people, according to a recent study by Ryerson University.
Hall and BNI hope to have at least 3.5 per cent of executive and board roles filled by Black leaders by 2025, and draw five per cent of summer students from the Black community, thereby changing the face of business in both the near and long terms.
So far, BNI is off to a flying start, if early momentum is any indication. Co-chairs of the initiative include Victor Dodig, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce chief executive, Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd. founder Prem Watsa, and Rola Dagher, global channel chief at Dell Technologies Inc.
More than 300 Canadian CEOs — of big banks, blue chip law firms, universities, mining companies, hospitals, airlines, charities and more — have signed BNI's pledge to “create opportunities within our companies for Black people,” and adopt measurable targets to track their progress toward that end.
What has helped the cause, no doubt, is that the guy calling the bigwigs in the corner offices and asking them to get with the program is a big shot himself.
“There is not a CEO in this country who would not return Wes's call inside of a day,” said Walied Soliman, a friend of Hall's, and chair of the law firm Norton Rose Fulbright LLP. Another friend, a non-Bay Street insider, phrased it thusly: “Everybody loves Wes.”
The Schulich Foundation, the philanthropic vehicle of billionaire investor Seymour Schulich, has stepped up with a million-dollar donation to BNI (which is going through the registration process to become a charity) to support the building of a Black cultural centre.
A BNI “virtual summit” is planned for the afternoon of Sept. 30. Conversations around race relations in Canada that were not happening six months ago are happening daily now.
“I hope it is not just a head fake,” said Hall, who has stepped back from his dayto-day activities at Kingsdale Advisors to devote “100 per cent” of his energy to the initiative. “I hope people are serious about change.”
“Hope” would be a good working title for a memoir, should Hall ever get around to writing his. For now, his calendar is jammed. He keeps three day planners on the desk of the main floor office in the yellow brick mansion filled with phone numbers, meeting times, ideas that pop into his head — questions he needs answers to — stuff he intends to get done.
It is outdoors, however, on a couch next to a pool overlooking a ravine and a maple tree, where Hall has done most of his work during the pandemic.
On a chilly September afternoon, the guy who paid for the multi-million-dollar-view was dressed in blue jeans and padding around in pink flip-flops.
Dave Budhlall, a childhood pal, nailed it: Hall is unguarded, open and hard not to like. There are no talking points, no script. On camping trips, he is skittish about putting the worm on a fishing hook; on cruises, he gravitates to the karaoke microphone; away from work, he will fight like hell to win at golf, pull-up contests and driveway basketball; when he hears of a relative in Jamaica needing surgery, he will pay for it.
“Wes loves people,” Budhlall said.
About that tin shack: it was his grandmother's place, and she was loving, kind, strong and the opposite of Hall's mother, who was abusive. By age 13, Hall was largely on his own, surviving on his wits, doing odd jobs, hustling for nickels and dimes. He refers to Sept. 27, 1985, the day he came to Canada, as the day he “left poverty.”
Hall had never seen an airplane up close until he was on one, destination Toronto, and his father's house on Hupfield Trail in the city's northeast corner. Leonard Hall, a glue factory worker by day and tailor by trade, made his son's clothes.
Hall remembers walking around Lester B. Pearson Collegiate, feigning a limp, trying to look cool, before being identified by his classmates as legitimately cool due to his Jamaican accent.
He kept hustling, too. Going to school, working a paper route, cleaning offices at night, leaving home at 18, getting married at 21, working at a chicken factory, having a kid, then another and then a third.
Hall worked at restaurants, crummy retail jobs, as a security guard and as a mailroom clerk at a downtown law firm, but he never stopped believing that he was destined for bigger things, even if he wasn't quite sure what they were, or exactly how to get there.
After receiving his law clerk's certificate from George Brown College in Toronto, he interviewed for a corporate job at Global Television, part of Canwest Global Communications Corp. (which once owned the National Post) in 1994.
He had the necessary qualifications, sure, but limited practical experience and zero chance, in his mind, of actually being hired. Then the phone rang. Glenn O'Farrell, who at the time was general legal counsel at Global, wanted to meet him for drinks.
“I don't even drink,” Hall said, recalling the memory with a laugh. “I didn't even know what it was to go out and have a drink with somebody, because I had never been invited to have a drink with anybody.”
O'Farrell ordered a beer. Hall did the same. He didn't like the taste, but faked that he did. The men talked. Mostly, O'Farrell listened. He wanted to know Hall's background. What was his story?
“So I told him, I told Glenn everything,” Hall said.
What struck O'Farrell was Wes's humanity. “It is an amazing, soul-stirring story, and it is not one that leaves anybody indifferent,” he said.
Hall was clearly ambitious, driven and bright. On paper, he was in way over his head, but in person he was irresistible. O'Farrell gave him a shot as his right-hand man, a mentorship that turned into a lasting friendship.
Within a decade, Hall had founded Kingsdale, borrowing against his house to start the business. In 2006, he cracked the big time, stickhandling the $18-billion takeover bid of Canadian nickel miner, Falconbridge Ltd. by the Swiss firm, Xstrata PLC.
The rest, as they say, was history, until George Floyd's murder, until Hall looked around at his own life, at his experience as a Black man, and realized enough was enough.
Bay Street made Hall rich, but it is also where he got wise to the fact that whenever he walked into the boardroom of company A, B or C, he was invariably the only Black person in the room.
“Toronto is a great multicultural society,” he said. “Then I go down to Bay Street and I don't see it there, and why is that?”
He tells the story of being pulled over by a cop in bumper-to-bumper downtown rush hour traffic in the black BMW sedan he worked his tail off to pay for, simply because his younger brother was drinking a pop in the passenger seat.
Budhlall, who is also Black, tells another story about a clerk tailing Hall around a gift shop while their families were on holiday together in Mont-Tremblant, Que.
“Wes is very forgiving and compassionate, and recognizes that change takes time, but that now is the time to stand up,” Budhlall said.
O'Farrell and Soliman, the lawyer at Norton Rose Fulbright, have the same message for their friend: Hall doesn't need to make any more money, now is his time. He is Wes Hall, after all, a guy who is hard not to like, a guy who CEOs actually call back, a Black guy who grew up in a tin shack.
Hall stresses that it is those early chapters in life — where so many never catch that break, run across a Glenn O'Farrell, get asked about who they are — that deserve attention.
“We appreciate the people who go from the mailroom to the boardroom,” he said. “But we don't see them until they actually get there. There are so many people knocking on that door, just waiting for a chance to get in, but not getting in because there aren't enough people looking at what they have had to overcome.”
Now, here we are, collectively, caught up in a global moment. Will BNI's efforts truly translate into a wider movement or are they merely a blip, a COVID-19 interlude, rendered in black and white? Where the idea of sharing a common purpose and creating lasting systemic change in race relations gets inoculated away the moment our attention drifts elsewhere?
Signing a CEO pledge is great, but so are New Year's resolutions, and we all know how those generally turn out.
To nudge matters along, perhaps, the federal government is partnering with the country's biggest banks in a new $200-million program aimed at helping Black business owners and entrepreneurs access loans and crucial services.
Change, it seems, is in the air, so much so that even the world weary are beginning to see some shoots of green.
Wendy Cukier, director of the Diversity Institute at Ryerson, has been around long enough to remember Olympic champion Donovan Bailey speaking out about racism in Canada in 1996. Bailey was largely vilified. Canadians didn't want to hear it, didn't want to believe it.
Now, CEOs of major corporations employing tens of thousands of people are acknowledging anti-Black systemic racism isn't just an issue, but a problem within some of their own organizations. It is a seismic shift, with BNI at the forefront.
“The optimist in me is very encouraged,” Cukier said. “The naming of the problem — in and of itself — is very significant.”
Hall sure hopes so. There is a big portrait of American civil rights icon Rosa Parks on the second-floor landing of the big yellow house. Hall put it there as inspiration, as a reminder of what is possible when people stand up for what's right.
“Rosa Parks could have been shot for what she did,” Hall said. “We are not asking anyone to risk their lives with what we are trying to do.”