Status of Women committee  Thank you for the question. A group of organizations have come together. All of them are pan-Canadian and have an impact across Canada. The ones I mentioned already are Catalyst, Women in Capital Markets, the ICD, the Clarkson Centre, the Canadian Coalition for Good Governance,

Status of Women committee  I'm just tuning you out.

Status of Women committee  Yes. In looking at countries that have introduced that, there are currently about 70 countries in the world that have paid paternity leave or shared parental leave. However, the ones that are the most forward-thinking have mandatory parental leave. Finland, Norway, Germany, and e

Status of Women committee  First, let me just comment on the quota and the actual number, because I do believe that you have to set a number that is high enough. The last thing you want is a woman eventually ending up wherever it might be, whether on the board or in senior roles, and she's the token quota

Status of Women committee  To me, after so many years of pushing for more women on boards and senior roles, the Ontario government, the OSC, has introduced the comply or explain policy, which they have been monitoring now for the last two or three years. The excuses that companies put in their proxy filing

Status of Women committee  John, before we go to that question, I think there's actually a deeper cause. Why are women starting businesses? If you look at the research around women entrepreneurs, you see that a lot of them leave the corporate environment, in many cases out of frustration. They say, “You kn

Status of Women committee  You would hope that a government is representative of the population. That is the main cause of having representation. If you have a government that is not very balanced.... In particular, gender balance is the obvious one to me, because we can easily measure whether we are fifty

Status of Women committee  You could put a hard quota in place, and, ideally, it would lead to every party being exactly gender-balanced. I think the challenge is that you might not have enough current supply, so to speak. This is something that needs to be built over time.

Status of Women committee  I believe, as I pointed out earlier, that we need to set some quota to make progress, and I believe, even at the federal level, that having an equal representation among various genders would be very desirable. The countries that have introduced that have a better balance, not on

Status of Women committee  This is not necessarily my area of expertise, but with my economic training, let me just try to give you a couple of suggestions around that. I think, again, it starts by building economic security earlier on in life. It is a challenge if you have been dependent on a partner—in

Status of Women committee  Thank you very much for having me here. I must admit, I'm a little like a fish outside the water. I don't do politics, and I am a problem-solver by training. I had a long-standing career at McKinsey as a problem-solver, and I'm now at the University of Toronto as a professor of