The "diversity" charade is destructive
Substituting "racism" for "racism" does not advance society
The Trudeau Liberals have promoted “diversity” as a Canadian value and no Canadian would deny the tremendous contribution immigrants from all parts of the world of every race, colour or faith have made to our multicultural country. Embracing the cosmopolitan nature of Canada is something that makes Canada distinctive.
In my opinion, Canada is the most inclusive and least racist country in existence, and the vast majority of Canadians value our culture of acceptance and relative absence of prejudices based on race or any other group identity for that matter. Other than Canada’s abhorrent treatment of indigeous Canadians throughout our history, Canada has welcomed people from all over the world who have become part of the fabric of our country. Approximately 26% of Canadians comprise people making up ethnic minorities with people from parts of Asia comprising almost two thirds of those. Oddly, when the press is screaming about “systemic racism” the alleged targets of the “racism” are rarely of Asian origin.
Multiculturism is truly one of Canada’s strengths, but Liberal ideas of “diversity” are a long way from embracing multiculturism. The “woke” Liberals have infected academia and our government institutions and are promoting diversity as measured by having the same proportion of every distinctive group represented pro rata in every faculty, boardroom, or institution. The absurdity of the “diversity” goals not only divides Canadians but also implies that knowledge and competence should be subordinated to gender, race, ethnicity, skin color, faith or sexual orientation in appointing directors to corporate boards, selecting members of cabinet, or hiring faculty in our universities and schools.
To staff an acceptably “diverse” board of directors for a Canadian corporation would require a board of 32 directors comprised of 16 women and 16 men, with at least one black, 1 aboriginal Canadian, 2 South Asians, 2 Southeast Asians, 1 West Asian and one 1 Latin American among those and at least three of those people would have to be LGBTQ+ and possibly 1 transgendered person and one who suffers a disability. Thirty two are needed to ensure we don’t have to dismember any one to meet our diversity “goals”. Since there are many faiths, it will be hard to ensure very board has a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu, a Sikh, a Catholic, a Protestant, a Seventh Day Adventist and a Jehovah’s Witness, and that is by no means a complete list. In recruiting for that board of directors, it may be necessary to relax our standards of education, experience, knowledge and competence since we have over 1.2 million corporations in Canada and directors must be at least 18 years of age, meaning successful achievement of the stated “diversity” objectives would see one in six Canadians appointed to a corporate board. Meeting the “transgendered” objective could be a challenge since it is estimated that this group comprises about one quarter of one percent of the population or something less than 100,000 persons.
The absurdity of the “woke” goal of “equity” and “equality” is patent. If the left wing leaders who think our capitalist system is unfair and that “inequity” is something they need to solve, I invite them to donate their worldly possessions to a global charity, buy a hair shirt, and start doing missionary work in Africa. The proper goal of “fairness” is equality of opportunity, not of outcomes, and even then “equality of opportunity” doesn’t mean pandering to people too stupid, too lazy or too incompetent to take advantage of the opportunities our country provides. We need to ask ourselves what is the fair amount society should take from someone who has earned something and give it to someone who has not?
We are starting to see this “woke” ideology invade legislation including our Corporations Act and proposed changes to the Securities Act and the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) which is to be renamed the Ontario Capital Market Authority. The Canada Business Corporations Act (CBCA) now requires corporations to report on how many women, indigenous people, persons with disabilties and visible minorities are represented on their boards of directors. The CBCA does not require corporations to report on the education, experience or qualifications of its directors.
The January 2021 Final Report of the Capital Markets Modernization Task Force (CMMTF) included the following comment on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) reporting:
“A recent survey of institutional investors, consultants and investment professionals from RBC Global Asset Management, listed the top ESG concerns for investors as corruption, climate change risk and shareholder rights. Additionally, the survey showed that the COVID-19 pandemic has raised investor consideration around labour relations, supply chains and diversity.”
Corruption is a serious issue, shareholders deserve protection and labour relations and supply chains are important areas of corporate governance. These issues are already well protected by Canadian corporations acts, securities acts, and, our criminal code.
Climate change is a politically motivated charade devoid of any substance being promoted by the United Nations and left wing political groups in the hope it will rally support for a post-national global socialist new world order. The theory that carbon dioxide emissions cause global warming is laughable when seen in the context of the laws of physics and chemistry. I have written about this nonsense in a separate article testing the Anthropogenic Global Warming theory using no more than basic physics and chemistry. Legislation compelling corporations to report on climate change risk is about as sensible as forcing them to report on what they are doing about diabetes or colon cancer.
ESG is a nebulous term yet our securities regulators now want to mandate disclosure of ESG “progress” and purported metrics. One characteristic of markets is that if society imposes higher regulatory costs on public businesses it will suffer lower returns in terms of growth, employment and dividends paid to society’s pension funds and mutual funds and ordinary investors. World renowned market expert Aswath Damodaran who teaches at the Stern School of Business at New York University wrote an article on ESG entitled “Sounding good or doing good? A skeptical look at ESG”. Damodaran’s extensive review of the hard data shows that emphasis of ESG fails to improve returns and often impairs them.
These changes and proposed changes to Canadian corporate and securities legislation emanate from the Trudeau Liberals’ ideology and are destructive to Canada’s economy and divisive to Canada’s society. When we start appointing people to high office because they represent a race, ethnicity, skin color, sexual orientation or particular faith we do so at the expense of the knowledge and competence of candidates who competed for that office based on qualifications alone. I have no doubt that open competition for boards and institutional posts will produce its own diversity since it is obvious that competent and experienced people populate each of the groups incorporation in the term “diversity” although the list mandated for reporting seems to omit white men and women, many of whom may also be competent and experienced.
The CMMTF report repeatedly uses the word “fairness” as if the subjective views of the regulator is all the adjudication of “fairness” that is required. It seemed to me incongruous that a set of proposals targeting “fairness” - defined by dictionaries to be “impartial and just treatment or behavior without favoritism or discrimination” - then goes on to propose steps that overtly discriminate in favour of certain groups which necessarily discriminates against those not listed as “diverse” enough to warrant the “fairness”.
The CMMTF report contains many proposals that will very likely improve securities regulation and enforcement, improve corporate disclosure and make it easier to prosecute securities offences. It is in that way an excellent report that has been co-opted by the Liberal left to include “woke” nonsense that improves nothing for anyone but causes actual harm.
Let’s put an end to this divisive crap from the Trudeau Liberals and their ilk at the next election and return Canada to normalcy, a country that recognizes that what separates most people from success is effort, and that race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation are characteristics, not qualifications.