The Decibel - How seriously is corporate Canada taking DEI these days?

Episode Date: October 9, 2025

Five years ago, hundreds of Canadian companies publicly pledged to address anti-Black racism. They signed the BlackNorth Initiative, which has since become the most high-profile DEI effort in corporate Canada.Many of the commitments came with a 2025 deadline. The Globe and Mail surveyed the signatories to find out how they’ve fared. Vanmala Subramaniam is the Future of Work reporter for The Globe. She explains the results that show that the enthusiasm employers once had for diversity projects has waned considerably.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

On his first day in office, U.S. President Donald Trump signed dozens of executive orders. One of them was called ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferencing. This moved chilled diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at a lot of American companies. But what about in Canada? Has this cultural shift amongst Wall Street companies hit Bay Street? And what about the rest of corporate Canada? Vanmela Subramanium is the Globe's future of work reporter. She's been surveying the companies that signed the Black North Initiative,

which is a commitment to hire and promote more black employees. It's been five years since businesses signed on, and Van Mala is here to tell us what she's found out about how DEI efforts are going at Canadian companies. I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is the Decival from the Globe and Mail. Hi, Van Mela. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me.

So let's start by talking about this Black North Initiative. What exactly is it? Yeah, so the Black North Initiative was basically a diversity project launched in, you know, the summer of 2020, it was around July, by West Hall. West Hall is a black Canadian. He's an immigrant from Jamaica. He grew up in Jamaica. He moved to Canada.

And he had quite a meteoric rise through predominantly, white Bay Street to get where he is today. And he launched the Black North Initiative with the goal of eliminating systemic black racism in workplaces. So basically, when he initially launched it, he had about 200 companies sign up for it very quickly, very early on. And this included heavyweights like the banks, like insurance companies, some of the big hospitals, non-profits. Within a couple of months, almost 500 companies signed up for the Black North Initiative, and they essentially pledged to commit overall to improving black representation in their workforces. Yeah, I want to get into the pledges. But before we go there, I wanted to kind of take a step

back because 2020 is a very, you know, important year. This is kind of the year that the murder of George Floyd happened. And this is kind of a time when there was a lot of response to this idea around equality for black people. Yeah, I think you're very right, Cheryl. You could say it really sparked a global racial reckoning. I mean, specifically it was the murder, as you say, of George Floyd, a black man by a white police officer that got people very mobilized into pushing for equality on race beyond just in the U.S. You know, this movement spread to Europe. It's spread to the U.K. spread very much to Canada, and it was the social pressure that mobilized hundreds of companies to suddenly shift the attention to anti-Black systemic racism, something that they've dabbled with

but never really had immense focus on. Which brings us to this Black North initiative. And so companies that signed on were challenged to commit to seven pledges. We don't have to go through all of them, but can you just give me a sense of what some of these pledges are? One of them was to have at least 3.5% of your board of a company and executive roles in your company occupied by black people by 2025. The other example of a pledge was to make sure your employee base more broadly had about 3.5% of black representation. And the 3.5% number, by the way, is the number of black people in

Canada or people who identify themselves as black in Canada. So it's equal representation in the workforce as the population. Is this just about black employees specifically or are we talking about racialized employees more broadly? The pledges themselves were about black employees, the specific pledges. But the spirit of the Black North Initiative, like the broader push that they were trying to get employers to, you know, really commit to was just improve representation in the workplace. So racialized representation in the workplace. I mean, to put it very simply, there was a feeling that workplaces were still too heavily white and that that needed to change based on changing demographics in Canada. Okay, so that's the origin of this

initiative. But I want to bring it to this current moment. Obviously, the cultural context around DEI has shifted pretty substantially since Donald Trump returned to the White House. So how has this shift been reflected in corporate culture? When Donald Trump took office in January 2025, he issued a series of executive orders that specifically targeted diversity, equity and inclusion programs, both in the public and private sectors. And they essentially were designed, you could say, to sort of prohibit lawful efforts to advance equal opportunity. And the ripple effect of this was felt in Canada because obviously, you know, we're north of the border, there are many companies, like many of the big banks that have offices in the U.S., that in a way are trying to traverse a very murky legal landscape when it comes to DEI if they have these internal DEI commitments, but also run divisions in the U.S. So companies started to really back away from at least public commitments to any further DEI initiatives. But I'm just wondering, is it that there are perhaps bigger issues that companies are facing right now?

For example, we hear a lot about economic uncertainty. I'm just wondering, is DEI taking a backseat to what might be seen as, quote unquote, bigger issues? Yeah, that's a really good question. It's hard to tell. It actually depends on the company, and I think it depends a lot on the company's economic or financial involvement in the U.S. On the one hand, you could argue, and I've heard this from lots of people in the DEI space, that internal company budgets have been slashed overall. And if they had to cut something, they would target DEI, you know, any kind of money that's going into DEI initiatives internally or externally. That's sort of on the back burner right now.

Now, that's things I've heard. I wouldn't generalize to say that that's most companies. But that is definitely happening. And it's impacting people, consultants mainly, who have gained a lot of clout over the last five years because of their services in providing help to companies to create more equality, racial equality in their workforce. So, Van, you've been surveying all the companies that signed on to this initiative about their progress since the initiative began. So let's look at this year's results. What were the main takeaways? One of the things that really stood out this year, and this year is five years since the pledge

was signed. Of the 481 companies that the globe reached out to, only 16% or 77 companies responded to us. Now, that's a real decline in the number of responses we've gotten this year. In 2023, for example, there were 124 companies that responded to us. And when we first, did the survey back in 2021, we had about 43% of companies responding to us. So you can see from the beginning, Cheryl, that there isn't an overly positive response to a newspaper reaching out to companies for them to share their metrics on diversity. I think companies tend to be a little bit wary of making these things public because they are afraid of public perception, either from people who will say they are deviating from merit-based hiring and just focusing on diversity

or people who critique them for not having a workforce that's diverse enough. And also, you know, a low response rate makes it hard for us to draw any conclusions about how companies have generally made radical, long-lasting shifts in diversity, right? Because the companies that respond tend to skew towards doing well on diversity metrics. So of the companies that did respond, what did you learn? Keeping in mind that the companies that responded, you know, tend to have more favorable positive diversity metrics, the median percentage of black employees, okay, amongst these 77 respondents, was about 6%, which is far higher than the pledge target of 3.5%. Now, the median percentage of black executives, people in higher positions, was 3.7% in 2025, also an increase

from 2020. In terms of board of directors, there was some movement there. 5% of the companies that responded had black board members and directors up from actually 0% in 2020. So you saw a big improvement there. We should also note that the Globe and Mail is a signatory. What did our employer say about its efforts? So in 2025, about 3% of our employee base identified as black, 29% identified as, you know, black indigenous and all people of color. That's a slight improvement from 2020. That's up from 25%. But, you know, the Globe and Mail has no black directors on its board, which is really just unchanged from previous years. Okay. So that that's the globe. But can we look at a few other companies and talk about their results for a

moment? What did you learn? Now, three of the five big banks committed to the Black North Pledge in 2020, that CIBC Bank of Montreal and Scotia Bank. Scotia Bank did not respond to our survey this year. They had in past years. CIBC had a very interesting improvement, actually, I would say. They reported that about 5% of their workforce in Canada consists of black employees and approximately 48% consists of all people of color, black indigenous and other people of color. That's almost half of their workforce, which I thought was very impressive. Now, let's compare that to 2021. You know, how did CIBC improve? In 2021, black, indigenous and other people of color made up about.

35% of their workforce and specifically black employees made up 3.5% of their workforce. So that is an improvement. You can see that. But having said that, amongst black executives, only 3% of executive roles at CIBC were held by black employees, which was unchanged from 2021. So you're seeing that there appears to be not much of an upward mobility, you could say, for black employees at CIBC. This is surely based on what we collected. And it's important to note here that banks are important to survey because what happens in banks tends to set the corporate culture

on Bay Street more broadly. Yeah, absolutely. It's a reason why I pulled out these bank examples. You know, I'll give you another example with the five big banks. More recently, they asked employees to come back into the office about four to five times a week. And you saw, you saw that happen everywhere, exactly. We'll be right back.

I want to dig into the results a bit deeper here, Van. Over the years, what have you learned about how companies approach hiring with DEI in mind? Yeah, so, you know, we've been doing these surveys. We've done four surveys over five years. And I'll tell you, Cheryl, one of the things that really, stood out to me was how quickly and effectively signatories committed to one of the pledges, which was setting up diversity councils, okay, or diversity committees. They were very quick to do that. They all did it almost, you know, within months of signing the pledge. Where they, I think, fell short

and the data sort of speaks to this is in advancement of black people. and generally people of color, within organizations, you can see that the statistics are very positive in terms of diversity when it comes to hiring black employees. But then as you move up and look at that black executive commitment, you see that there's not much change between 2021 and 2025. And we saw it in the case of, you know, CIBC, for example. But there are other examples where there hasn't been much movement. So I will say that it is one thing to commit to hiring people of color. But if you do not have a culture within your organization that is welcoming for racialized staff that can foster their advancement, where you have mentors that are dedicated to, you know, really making these people feel that they belong in a certain workplace, you are likely to see them leave or you are likely to see them be.

stagnant in the workforce in terms of rank. You mentioned earlier that a lot of these companies were able to kind of set up like diversity committees, workshops or, you know, employee diversity training. Why can't they get past this initial phase? You know, part of it, and Wes Hall himself has alluded to this, and DEI experts that I spoke to have alluded to this as well, is it's really important to have senior leadership in a company that is genuinely committed to creating change. So one of the things in the Black North pledge was something called a CEO pledge.

And effectively what it, the intention at least of the pledge was for the person at the top to commit to all these various sub pledges of meeting diversity metrics. And if the CEO himself signs it and feels like he's committed, the idea is that there will be a trickle-down effect and it will change the culture of the organization. So I think it is, if you have, say, a diversity committee or a section of your HR practice or group that is just focused on diversity and the rest of the organization remains the same culturally, it is very hard to create sort of permanent change in an organization. There has been sort of like a fatigue, I would say of talking about race. And again, if you don't have people in your organization who run the

place who genuinely believe that having a diverse workplace is better for you, it is going to be harder for you to create long-lasting change in a company on this issue. It seems like one of the issues with this initiative was that after companies signed up, there was no way to make sure they were actually working on these goals. Like it was a voluntary thing. And your survey was also voluntary ban. But is there a way to hold companies accountable for their DEI efforts in the way that we can for some companies and their environmental pledges? There is a way.

If for publicly listed companies, I think if shareholders can apply pressure to publicly listed companies to disclose in the annual report what their diversity metrics are, that would really make a difference because people, you know, sometimes invest in companies based on ethics. And if they feel that a company is, you know, not diverse enough and they care about things like that, it could be a good measure of pushing these companies to really commit to what they signed up for by reporting specifically on their DEI numbers. I just want to say some big companies already do that. The Bank of Montreal, for example, in their annual report, I got a couple of pieces of data that they disclosed publicly about the number of Blackboard members that they had, which had gone up over time. It would really help if more companies do that

and if there is shareholder pressure to do that. So for the companies that are still pursuing DEI goals, why do they say that it's important? You know, I think that the companies that are still prioritizing this really believe in it, that the more, you know, egalitarian the organization is by, say, race and class, the more that actually helps them grow, even financially. There is a business case to be made about DEI and, you know, that's been made for years now by many people that when you involve people who come from different backgrounds and have diverse opinions and different views based on how they were raised, that actually adds to the conversation, that actually adds to innovation within a workplace, as opposed to having people at the top who run a place

who are off the same race and off the same class. And I think that has been proven, in fact. So I think the companies that are holding on to DEI, it's perhaps because they genuinely believe that it does help them to have a more diverse workforce. Before we wrap, Van, it's now been five years for this pledge, and a lot of the goals of this pledge were supposed to be accomplished by now. So what happens next? So the Black North Initiative has this year launched something called Pledge 2.0. And what it is is basically it's encouraging companies that had already signed the first pledge to renew their commitments to the pledge. Very specifically, they called on them to actually commit to annual surveys

and to track their commitment to diversity and equity annually, which is what we have been trying to do over the last five years. What is important to note also here, Cheryl, is that according to West Hall, he told us this in an email, about 90% of signatories renewed their commitment to Black North and fewer than 10% have left the commitment. And so overwhelmingly signatories or companies appear to still want to continue working with Black North on this. What do we know about the companies that decided not to recommit to this effort?

We did have signatories that we spoke to on background, we can't quote them, who told us that they actually stopped engaging with Black North after finding that the organization itself wasn't very helpful. So they didn't provide strategic help. they were sometimes not responsive to questions. On the flip side, Black North reached out to these companies frequently when they wanted donations for their program. So there were a couple of companies that were actually quite critical of Black North, I would say. And I need to point out here, Black North is a non-profit.

A lot of their funding comes from signatories. What has Black North said about these comments about, you know, the fact that these companies are critical of them? What have they said about it? Well, we actually asked them very specifically. questions on that, and they did not respond specifically. They responded very generically about Pledge 2.0, but we didn't get any tangible information from them as to why some signatories might have pulled out of the initiative. Some of the experts I spoke to who work in

the DEI space said that companies tend to rely on organizations like Black North to hold their hand in a way and, you know, tell them what to do, how to do it, how to create meaningful change on diversity within a workplace. And they say that organizations like Black North cannot be leading the charge on this. Workplaces themselves, after a while, need to find a way to embed diversity into their culture, you know, a fit diversity in with intention to create a sustainable change. Just lastly, Van, does Black North consider their initiative a success? Yes, Black North considers their initiative a big success. And I will say that speaking to people, not within the organization, but people in the DEI world who have observed Black North's

growth, they say that this specific diversity organization has actually did something very effective, which is that West Hall managed to rally such a broad number of companies to sign up to something that they perhaps wouldn't have done. And, you know, you got nonprofits, government agencies, big private sector companies all committing to these diversity pledges. At least you got them thinking about it. And I don't think there has been another organization that has gotten sort of this reach of people committed to one issue. Van Mela, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you so much for having me, Cheryl.

That was Van Mala Supermanium, the Globe's Future of Work Reporter. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Our producers are Madeline White, Mikhail Stein, and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer,

and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening and I'll talk to you soon.