This morning, the team at SHARE opened the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) to mark International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Hosted in collaboration with TMX Group, this morning’s event brought together institutional investors and financial leaders to celebrate the progress being made in building more productive and inclusive capital markets and corporations, while acknowledging the continued work needed to eliminate racial discrimination and remove bias in recruitment, hiring, advancement, and board and executive appointment processes.
It has been nearly 60 years since the United Nations proclaimed March 21 to be the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. While we have come a long way since then, we still have much collective work to be done.
We are at a critical moment for Canadian capital markets and businesses. The external environment is chaotic, and the pressure of tariffs and economic uncertainty are weighing on us all.
We are seeing legislative and other attacks on private companies in the United States for daring to eliminate racial and gender bias in recruitment, hiring, and advancement, in board and leadership appointments, through even the most innocuous diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
Canada’s business and political community is not immune to these pressures, but we are decidedly different. Canadian markets have been on a long journey to identify and eliminate barriers to inclusion, barriers to leadership development, barriers to opportunity, and barriers to access to capital for marginalized communities.
Those efforts have been led by communities themselves, and supported by business and investor leaders who have recognized the intrinsic value of a business ecosystem that opens its doors to the best available talent and innovation.
We know that our markets work best when they break down any barriers that might still disadvantage the people and businesses whose ideas and abilities might remain untapped.
We recognize that the current external environment is challenging – yet we still believe that the value that diversity and equity brings to Canadian business is worth taking up that challenge. We believe that to do otherwise is to abandon both value and values.
Openness to diversity, equity and inclusion is a critical differentiator for Canadian businesses, Canadian capital markets, and Canadian investors, and a critical driver of value within those markets.
That work can be assisted by good regulations in our capital markets. We’re counting on Canadian securities regulators to complete their work on the next phase of rule-making for disclosure on diversity in boards and executive leadership.
That work can also be assisted by investors who promote best practices within their own organizations, and within their investee companies.
One example of this shared work took place 4 years ago when TMX agreed to jointly support a resolution on reconciliation and Indigenous relations presented collaboratively by SHARE, the Atkinson Foundation and the National Aboriginal Trust Officers Association (NATOA). That was the first time an Indigenous reconciliation or diversity proposal has ever been jointly endorsed by the Board of Directors of a Canadian company. That important progress was historic and the type of work that fuels us at SHARE to keep pushing forward.
That made it even more special to be there today with the Toronto Stock Exchange, where those efforts to welcome and assist diverse businesses and business leaders has been a hallmark of their own work to promote mature and growing capital markets and facilitate capital formation wherever it can be marshalled to reward Canadian innovation, expertise and job creation.
I want to extend my thanks to the leadership of the TMX Group and to the leadership of everyone in this room who has been promoting and continue to promote, develop, and invest in the individual talent and business opportunities that make Canadian markets unique, productive, innovative, and more fair.
