Good morning, everyone.
My name is Scott Garvie. I'm the chair of the board of the Canadian Media Producers Association. With me today is Marguerite Pigott, vice-president of outreach and strategic initiatives at the association.
The Canadian Media Producers Association has over 400 member companies across Canada producing and exporting film, television, and interactive digital media, which travels around the world and across platforms. Some recent examples of the work by our members include the Academy Award-nominated feature film The Breadwinner, the adaption of Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace on Netflix and CBC, and my own Murdoch Mysteries and Frankie Drake on CBC.
Our association is taking an active leadership role with other stakeholders in our industry to ensure proactive steps are being taken towards achieving gender parity in front of and behind the camera, as well as ensuring respectful workplaces and other timely important initiatives. We are delighted that this committee is now looking at the question of ensuring gender parity and diversity in the leadership of the cultural institutions in Canada and on the boards of those institutions.
Marguerite will share with you shortly some recommendations we have, but first I wanted to speak briefly about how the CMPA, as a member-driven organization, has tried to deal with the issue on our elected board. We've basically taken three steps: recognition, action, and opportunity.
First, on recognition, we recognize that gender balance is a challenge within our own organization at the board level. We reviewed the historical makeup of our board and realized that in the eight years prior to our last election, we averaged around 32% of our board being female. We wanted to increase that percentage, so we went to our board and we amended the board election process to have a mandate to specifically recognize gender balance and diversity as objectives going forward. This was unanimously approved by our board as a guiding principle for our governance.
Second, on action, we wanted to be proactive and drive change at the same time that we were engaging in the slower process of bylaw review. Our first step was to look at the renewal of the board. We asked long-standing board members or had them agree not to run again in order to create a high availability of board seats. This, along with the impact of the election results, resulted in having about 40% new members on our board of 24 as of the last election. We also did board outreach to each of our 400 member companies to encourage involvement on the board and on our committees. Our bylaws mandate regional representation, so we also encouraged each region to try to get to a fifty-fifty female-male split of nominees for the next election.
Though we had an unprecedented number of candidates run in the last election, we weren't sure that this would be enough to trigger meaningful change on the diversity and parity equation. We took the further step to have 18 of our 24 seats elected and the remaining seats appointed, so that we could balance the composition of the board as needed. We took this plan to our members in a membership vote, and I'm proud to say that this approach was unanimously approved by all our members. The election process resulted in five of the 18 elected seats being held by women, as well as five of the seven appointed seats, so that our board now sits at 10 women and 13 men—43%.
Third, on opportunity, we have tried to encourage more female involvement and more leadership roles at the committee level. The CMPA has 19 committees. Appointments to committee chair or co-chair roles were made with gender balance in mind. Additionally, each of these new committee leaders was tasked with populating their committees, thereby bringing new voices and diverse perspectives into the leadership structure of the CMPA.
As these new committee members grow in expertise and experience, they become potential candidates for the board going forward. Their involvement and leadership on these committees will naturally increase these new entrants' stature within the association. This is opportunity in training, with a view to enhancing parity and diversity organically until they become the new norm, as they should be.
I have one last comment before passing you on to Marguerite. There are many compelling reasons that illustrate the importance of achieving gender balance in the leadership of our cultural institutions. The one closest to my heart is how important it is that we give clear aspirational messages to our youth about what they can achieve in the future. In our industry, the message we send is that diversity and parity is a fundamental given, whether people are in front, behind, or in the boardroom driving the creation of creative content.
Our youth see that equality represented when they look at who is doing what in the cultural space in Canada. A personal example from last week is that my 12-year-old daughter was lucky enough to be in Ottawa on a school trip and came home thrilled to have gone to the Supreme Court of Canada. Her first question to me was whether I had met former chief justice Beverley McLachlin, as she had a really good job. The second question was about how she could get that job when she was older.