Women And Leadership

January 21, 2014

Women And Leadership

Chairman: Noble Chummar, President, The Empire Club of Canada

Head Table Guests

Tom McKaig, Adjunct Professor, University of Guelph, and Director, The Empire Club of Canada;

Kerry K. Paterson, Student, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto;

Captain Reverend Eleanor Clitheroe;

Stephen Banquier, Director, Prime Brokerage, TD Securities;

Pamela Jeffery, Founder, Women’s Executive Network and the Canadian Board Diversity Council;

Stephen Hewitt, Senior Manager, TD Bank Group, and Director, The Empire Club of Canada;

Alex Johnston, Executive Director, Catalyst Canada; and

Malliha Wilson, Assistant Deputy Attorney General, Ministry of the Attorney General of the Province of Ontario.

Introduction by Noble Chummar

The Empire Club has had the honour of hosting many of Canada’s most prominent women. In 1930, we hosted Cairine Wilson who was Canada’s first woman senator. In I957, we hosted the Honourable Ellen Fairclough who was Canada’s first woman cabinet minister. In 1964, we hosted the Right Honourable Kim Campbell, Canada’s first woman prime minister. And in 2001, we had the honour of hearing from the Right Honourable Beverly McLachlin, the first woman chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. We have indeed come a long way in Canadian society, but I’m sure that the minister will tell us that we still have some ways to go.

Last week, the Ontario Security’s Commission proposed a new rule that would require companies to report annually on their policies to add more women to our board rooms and to our executive ranks. This type of public-policy change is a result of decades of perseverance and education of all Canadians, men and women. Many politicians have made speeches at this podium as I’ve mentioned. Very few of them in our 110-year history have had the chance to wear two different hats. Our guest speaker has, only six years ago, addressed the club. Then she was just a rising star, a world leader in pediatric surgery, a recent member of Canada’s Top 40 under 40. In 2010, Dr. Leitch was honoured with the Order of Ontario for her work advocating for children and youth.

Today, the Honourable Dr. Kellie Leitch is a Member of Parliament, Minister of Labour and Minister Responsible for the Status of Women. Dr. Leitch holds a doctor ate in medicine from the University of Toronto, an MBA from Dalhousie University, and completed the Orthopedic Surgery Residency program at the Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles at the University of Southern California. Throughout her career in the medical profession and as a volunteer and now in public life, Dr. Leitch has made it a priority to address the unique challenges of women and girls.

Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure in welcoming the Honourable Kellie Leitch to the Empire Club of Canada.

Kellie Leitch

Thank you very much. So how many of you have a daughter, granddaughter, or a niece? Pretty much everyone in the room, save a handful. I was having a conversation with probably my best friend a couple of days ago. He’s someone for whom I have a lot of respect. I said to him that I was going to make this speech. He’s very well read; has read the OSC report and other things. I said to him, “Well what do you think?” He said, “It’s all about leadership.” That’s the issue. It’s about leadership. His name is Kit Leitch. He is my father and he has two daughters—me and my sister, who’s an engineer. She also has an MBA and he says it’s all about leadership and I would say exactly the same.

We need to create a supportive environment for women to be successful in Canada and we’ve done a great job of that in academia; we’ve done a great job of it in my profession, in medicine. We’ve seen the numbers move. But I’m here to challenge you to make sure that we’re also doing that in other areas of Canadian society because this is something we can’t continue to ignore. This is something that we have to address. I’m a pediatric orthopaedic surgeon and that didn’t happen by accident. It happened because of a guy by the name of Dr. Allan Gross and another man by the name of Dr. John Wedge, both in their fifties, late fifties actually. Depending upon how he looks during the day some people would say that Allan is in his late sixties. They decided in 1990 that having women surgeons was important to the country and they went about focusing on recruiting women to become surgeons, and I was part of that pipeline.

Allan Gross, starting in my second year of medical school, provided me with opportunities to do research, and most importantly he gave me a seat at the table. More appropriately, he gave me a place to stand at the table in the operating room, holding the knife, being responsible for the patient. And that’s what we need to do in other professions; create the pipeline and give people responsibility. We’ve seen, in medicine, substantive change.

In 1990, when I was a medical student, less than 3 per cent of the orthopaedic surgeons in this country were women. If you look now, 33 per cent of the people who are in that population of new orthopaedic surgeons in the country, which is over 1,400, 33 per cent of them are women. There has been a huge change in two decades. It took time, but it was a focused effort. We have an opportunity because of leadership to move the dial here, and I’m encouraging all of you and your colleagues at work to participate. We know here in Canada we have a really substantive un- tapped resource. We talk a lot about those individuals who may not be involved or represented in certain organizations. So by way of example, if you look at mining, we know that we’re going to have a skills shortage, a shortage of individuals who work in the mining field in 2021 of over 120,000 people. That’s a huge gap. But only 15 per cent of the people working in mining right now are women. We know that women are well educated; there are just as many women as men in many of our classrooms.

I did pretty well in math and so did many of my colleagues, but it’s an untapped resource. We’ve seen the change in medicine, as I mentioned before. From 2004 to 2008 we saw an increase of 24 per cent of women graduates from medical school. In fact 53 per cent of people who graduate from medical school now are women. And 37 per cent of practising lawyers in our country are women. They are playing leadership roles, as was mentioned earlier, in the government of Ontario, like one of our head table guests. We are seeing this change in certain professions and we need to do more, and a number of CEOs in the country are focused on making sure we are doing this in their trades.

I was talking to the owner of a large construction company in Western Canada, Brosco Construction, and he said to me, “I am taking a unique approach to helping build the Calgary airport, because I didn’t have enough people. Instead of having a regular 9 to 5 workday, we run our construction company from 6:30 in the morning until 8:00 at night sometimes. We decided to be quite flexible. We went out and recruited a bunch of moms, women, to drive our heavy equipment trucks. They come to work at 9:30 after they take their kids to school. They leave at 3:30 so they can be standing in the schoolyard to pick their children up. We’ve gone from having no one to help run our heavy equipment to actually having a working population. They may be only there six hours, but at least they’re there.” And most importantly, these women have a great quality of life. They are able to buy hockey equipment for their kids and young men behave better on the worksite when there’s a mom there.

So here’s a CEO who’s doing what he needs to do to make his business work. We need to do the same when it comes to women on boards. We know the number; it’s been published. About 14.5 per cent of board positions are held by women. I would say that if a group of orthopaedic surgeons and a group of construction guys can figure this out I’m pretty confident the people in downtown Toronto and corporate Canada can too. I want to commend the OSC for bringing forward their report. It obviously represents a number of leaders across the country.

From the federal government perspective, we’ve taken leadership too. In fact, the 2012 economic action plan announced an advisory committee for women on boards. We’re working through that process. We have a number of advisory boards, some of which are here today, and are focused on looking at this from a national perspective. But the federal government is also taking on leadership in a number of other ways. In fact, amongst our boards whether that be the judiciary, crown corporations, deputy ministers, and assistant deputy ministers, 31 per cent of them are women. This is a number that I think we should be quite proud of, but this didn’t happen by accident. In fact, in 1990 it was about 10 per cent. It’s because my boss, the Prime Minister, means business. He’s being a leader. The Deputy Clerk of the Privy Council, Janice Charette, is a woman. The Deputy Minister of Labour, Hélène Gosselin, is a woman. The Minister of Transportation for our country—vitally important to the economy—is a woman, Minister Lisa Raitt. The Minister of Public Works and in charge of procurement for the country is a woman, the Honourable Diane Finley. My boss makes sure that we’re all accountable for this.

It’s important, it’s about leadership, and as my mom used to say to me all the time, “Kellie, you’ve got to lead by example.” And that’s what he’s doing. And so what I would say is that we have a great opportunity here. There are a number of things that I think we’ve all heard about that are things that have to be addressed. People may not have the right experience. They may not have had the right opportunities. There may be a need for a longer list to pick from. There are a number of things that get put up as challenges and I recognize that. It’s something that our advisory board heard about across the country and what I’ve heard from round table discussions all over the country. I recognize that, but what the advisory board has also heard, and I’ve heard from a number of different organizations and a number of people from across the country on a regular basis, is that there are certain things that we can do to fix this. I would say that my former boss and mentor, Dr. Allan Gross from my profession, understood that.

So what are those things? On our advisory board is a number of prominent Canadians; I think a number of them are here. You can put your hands up. Don’t be shy. Alan Horn from Rogers, Helen Jefferies, Catherine Swift, Alex Johnston from Catalyst, Isabelle Hudon from Sun Life, Monique Leroux from Desjardins, and Linda Hasenfratz from Linamar. These are prominent Canadians who actually know a lot about corporate Canada. What we’ve heard is that you need a champion. You need someone who says, “You are the person that they want to have succeed.” You need role models—men and women. We need to develop networks. We need to have opportunities for women in finance and operations. We do not need quotas. That’s something that shouldn’t be considered. We need to create an opportunity to focus on targets and goals and, most importantly, we need to create that pipeline, where there is opportunity for people to move through the process. I think there’s a wealth of evidence out there, and I’m sure many people in the room have heard it, for making the case for this for business, whether that be for the Fortune 500 companies between 2004 and 2008 and the increase in return on investment between those that have a lot of women on their boards to those that have a few— a few being 26 per cent—or whether that be an increase in sales, an increase of 16 per cent if you have more women on your board, versus fewer. We see the same numbers in the United States. We see the same numbers in Europe. But really what this is about is whether you have everybody you need at your boardroom table. Have you provided the opportunity for everyone to be at the table? That’s good for your business. I was talking with Bob Prichard just a couple of days ago. As you know, he’s a former president of the University of Toronto, and a University of Toronto alumnus. He’s also the chair of the BMO board and they have four women on their board. What he said to me was that one of the most substantive reasons to have more women on your board is that it creates a different dynamic.

The other thing that happens is that it provides an opportunity for people to say things about the subject matter that’s being spoken about. You don’t become the advocate for a certain gender at the table. I recognize that this can happen on both sides because I’ve sat in a room where there was one male nurse trying to advocate for certain things, so this happens in other environments. It creates a different dynamic of dialogue because it’s not all about locker room talk. It becomes focused dialogue that is better for the business and better for the discussion. And that’s what we need. We need to have a dynamic where the most important things to the firm are discussed at the table in a thoughtful way. I think that’s exceptionally important.

How many of you are involved in a hockey draft or have heard about a hockey draft? It’s okay you can put your hands up. You’re Canadian so you’re allowed to talk about hockey. When you get the hockey draft list you have a whole list of players. Nobody ever rips the list in half and puts half the list on the table and says, “I’m only going to consider these 15 guys,” because your other colleagues have the whole list. Why would you ever do that because the part of the list you’re not considering might have Sydney Crosby on it or Price who is an amazing goalie from the Canadiens? Why would you not want to consider them for your draft? We need to consider the whole list because there’s value in making sure that you’re considering every person who has something to offer. That’s how you get the best dialogue at the table and that’s how you make the best decisions. I think that if you are taking away half your list, you’re putting yourself at a competitive disadvantage and why would you ever do that?

So, I encourage everybody today to go home and think about the thing I talked about first. Do you have a daughter, or a grand- daughter, or a niece? Think about what you can do to move the bar for them or what you think already occurs for your nephew, or your son, or your grandson, and what you could do differently to help move that bar? I don’t have kids, but I have three nieces and I hope that they are treated exactly like my nephew in the workplace when they’re all older, because that’s what Canada is about. Canada is about making sure that people who work hard are successful. Merit and because you’re the best person is the reason you end up in a role.

So, I am here today to ask for your help as the Minister of the Status of Women and the Minister of Labour. I’m going to go out and look at my colleagues in the face and encourage them to do better. We are at 31 per cent, but even we can do better. I need you to do exactly the same. We need to make sure that we are focused on making sure that young women have these opportunities. I challenge you to do the same thing, whether that’s doing what I’m going to do—helping create that pipeline, and we have a fabulous pipeline in the federal government through Crown Corporations giving women opportunities to have operational and financial experience so they can be considered for other boards—or whether that’s being a champion for a young woman or whether that’s playing a leadership role. I’m going to do that. But I need you to do exactly the same things because this is good for Canada and it’s good for our global competitiveness. It makes sense. And overall it’s good for women, it’s good for the economy, and it’s good for business. We need all of you leaders to do your part and I know you can. Thank you very much.

The appreciation of the meeting was expressed by Stephen Hewitt, Senior Manager, TD Bank Group, and Director, The Empire Club of Canada.