Canada stands on the brink of economic upheaval, buffeted by soaring tariffs and mounting global instability. To those who think that further investment in childcare is a luxury we cannot afford in these times, they would be wrong. A robust care economy will be Canada’s best defence, building resilience, boosting productivity, and ensuring our nation’s inclusive future. Most importantly, it enables women—who still shoulder a disproportionate share of caregiving—to fully participate in the labour market, closing long-standing gender gaps in income, leadership, and opportunity.

Across the world, LGBTQ+ communities are confronting a growing tsunami of hostility – laws targeting their identities, escalating social ostracism, and rhetoric that feels ripped straight from darker chapters of history. But there’s another battlefront, quieter yet no less fierce: the sleek, hushed boardrooms of corporate power. In Canada, as in much of the world, the lavender ceiling remains stubbornly intact, nearly invisible yet profoundly unyielding.Take this sobering statistic: among the more than 9,300 directors who graced Toronto Stock Exchange-listed companies from 2015 to 2022, just 0.15 per cent were openly LGBTQ+.

Comply-or-explain disclosure requirements for gender diversity on corporate boards have existed in Canada since 2014. We discuss the initial findings from our on-going project to analyze the effects of Canada’s regulation. Our qualitative content analysis of the texts of Canadian corporate disclosures involves a four-year period and entails over 3,000 firm-year observations. With a focus on firms’ explanations for non-compliance, our results suggest that firms avoid the costliest actions, that they rely on obfuscation and other approaches to make it difficult for evaluators to interpret the disclosures, and that they offer thin, weak, or otherwise suboptimal explanations for failure to make progress that draw on tired tropes about meritocracy and pipeline limitations.

Yet the challenge is not primarily about the pipeline. There are many board-qualified LGBTQ+ people who are not being given opportunities to serve as a corporate director today. Canadian boards are often seen as “boys’ clubs” that have excluded not only women (who are only 27 per cent of board directors today) but also other people from under-represented groups (racialized people, Indigenous people, people with disabilities and LGBTQ+ people to name a few). By blaming the pipeline, they are giving themselves an excuse for not trying harder to build a more diverse, and therefore more effective, board.

Analyzing the dynamics of remote work with an intersectional lens—one that pays attention to the compounding impacts of gender, race, Indigeneity, immigration status, disability and other factors—allows us to understand how different groups may be experiencing this transformation in work culture. While remote and hybrid work models have improved many workers’ lives, they are also associated with career penalties, work-family conflict, higher stress levels, and other mental health challenges—particularly for those who were already experiencing inequity. Many of these disadvantages come about not because of anything inherent about remote work but because of the biases, stereotypes and social norms surrounding paid and unpaid work. Organizations therefore need to take measures to ensure well-being and fairness for all employees who are now working from home.

While the social, moral, human rights and economic arguments for eliminating Gender-Based Violence are unequivocally clear, actions to repair the tears in the societal fabric that enable GBV have been fraught with inadequate and piecemeal investments. This has resulted in uncoordinated and sub-optimal approaches to preventing and addressing the scourge of gendered violence. Yet, with the right support, survivors can experience improved health and well-being, improved self-confidence, reduced psychological distress, increased social connectedness, increased motivation to help others facing violence, and be empowered to regain control and autonomy in their lives. So, how should these barriers be addressed?

AI has immense potential. It can improve our productivity and also our predictions and decisions, which in turn can help reduce disparities. We all have unconscious biases that influence our choices and actions. It can be hard to understand how we’ve arrived at them and whether biases have played a role. Because AI is programmed and can be audited and changed, it can theoretically help us be more accurate and fairer.  But AI is built with data that has been generated from databases of existing information, such as images, texts, and historical data, so our biases become built-in. Its effects on marginalized groups are often unrecognized even as they are perpetuated, because the technology appears to be objective and neutral. Our report on AI research outlines what scholars have found about how AI can contribute to inequity and what can be done to mitigate it. 

As pandemic restrictions have eased, many of us are still working from home. Whether in a hybrid arrangement or working remotely full-time, a lot of people prefer skipping their commute to enjoy a more relaxed working environment. Statistics Canada reports that 80 per cent of those who began working remotely during the pandemic would prefer to continue working at least half of their hours at home. The way that people perceive and experience work has changed drastically over the last two years.

Public investment in care infrastructure is often framed in terms of helping women join the paid labour force, with the resulting increased returns to the economy. Indeed, a recent estimate of the unmonetized value of unpaid household activities is about $860 billion. That would be more than 37 per cent of GDP if it were counted. Yet, while the evidence is clear that policies creating more affordable and accessible care will help the economy, making care accessible doesn’t just help people join the paid labour force. It is crucial to help dependents live healthy lives, to help children learn and grow, and to ensure older adults age with dignity.

When policymakers worry about how investments in child care might correlate with voter intentions, it leads to three kinds of policy errors. First, it underestimates women and their solidarity with one another, among families and between generations, especially grandparents. Second, it asks people to rank a policy option that most didn’t have the benefit of experiencing and can’t fully imagine—regulated child care is only available for 27 per cent of Canadian kids, and its quality and cost vary widely. Third, as Canadians, we tend to undervalue, under-resource and under-recognize care. Unpaid care work is not counted in the GDP, and paid care work is poorly compensated.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted more than ever the corporate world’s role in addressing social issues. And beyond that, regulators, institutional investors, consumers and workers are intensifying their attention to climate risk, systemic racism, women’s economic inclusion and Indigenous rights, among other challenges of our century. Governance and other reforms to address these challenges are speeding ahead in countries around the world, and Canada risks being left behind.

The year 2020 has shown us, perhaps more than ever, the truth of the phrase "if you haven't got your health, you haven't got anything." It's as true for companies as it is for ourselves. But, company health is not just financial. Increasingly, research shows that company resilience in the face of shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic is as much about trust as anything else: Trust in the eyes of customers, employees, regulators and other stakeholders who are important to a company's success. Trust-building - whether you call it corporate social responsibility or stakeholder management - has always been the smart thing to do, and even more so now.