Thank you.
I always go back to Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella's comment about voluntarism. Because these barriers are so self-perpetuating, to wait and hope is not going to have any impact.
We need better data. I share with Stats Canada, but if the institutions aren't collecting it and collecting it in a systematic way, we're not going to get there. We need good administrative data for each of the equity-deserving groups.
Second, we need transparency and accountability. MP Goodridge talked about transparency for data later on in the career trajectory, at the higher salary rates. Perhaps we need to see those opening salary rates. If they were transparent, maybe institutions would be less likely to have discrepancies, or we might see fewer biases emerge from the discretionary or the hidden. I think that's really important.
I think that maybe we need to restrict the other kinds of hidden salaries, whether it's market supplements or these other kinds of factors, or make them public as part of accountability. Also, there need to be consequences for people who are in these roles like mine. If we are tasked or mandated to overlook equity, what are we doing to ensure it's actually happening? I believe that there isn't a lot of accountability despite the talk, and that is a factor for us.
I personally would like to see a royal commission that looks at racialized minorities in particular—we've had gender, and we've had indigenous—because I think this is a lot of wasted talent, untapped talent, and it impacts our prosperity, it impacts productivity and it impacts our innovation. This is a huge problem for universities, but I think more broadly for our economy in Canada.
There isn't an accountability that's mandatory, with impacts, so we keep talking about it but doing nothing, really.