With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1332052
14 BCBUSINESS JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 READ THIS Trying to build or improve your diversity and inclusion program? In Birds of All Feathers: Doing Diversity and Inclusion Right, Michael Bach argues that the so-called social justice model of D&I doesn't work because it requires straight, white, able-bodied men to willingly give up their power. Bach, founder and CEO of the Toronto-based Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion, lays out the business case for getting everyone on board by making creativity and innovation the end goal. Full of practical advice, his book includes chapters on attracting talent from underrepresented groups, measuring a D&I program's success and overcoming diversity fatigue. Page Two Books 206 pages, paperback, $19.95 • ( the informer ) and chief policy officer for the Business Council of B.C. (an association representing big business, it should be noted). "A lot of businesses, I'm afraid, are going to fail because of the protracted nature of this disruption." Ten to 15 percent of busi- nesses with paid employees operating at the start of the pandemic will disappear by the end of 2021, the BCBC pre- dicts. Indeed, the wave of exits and insolvencies is expected to really break this year as companies' balance sheets deteriorate and governments' emergency support inevitably winds down. There's no easy solution to B.C.'s and Canada's diminu- tive corporate stature. In a 2016 study covering the years 2001-13, the Business Develop- ment Bank of Canada found that Canadian businesses were almost all small and getting gradually smaller and that the number of midsized busi- nesses graduating to the big leagues was slowing down. The problem was even more acute in B.C., which accounted for just 10 percent of the coun- try's big-business graduates over that period. Demographics may account for some of the slowdown—as the population ages, fewer truly scalable startups get founded. But there are other factors at work; both small and midsized businesses lag big businesses in investment in tangible fixed assets per employee by a wide margin, for example. The trend reversed some- what in 2014-18, notes the re- port's Montreal-based author, BDC senior economist Sylvie Ratté, looking at the latest Sta- tistics Canada data. The share of micro-firms decreased and large firms increased incre- mentally. However, B.C. com- panies remain smaller than the national average. For ex- ample, 1.1 percent of the prov- ince's businesses have more than 100 employees, versus 1.3 percent nationally. In a 2017 manifesto entitled "Why Canadian Businesses Need to Think Big" published in The Walrus, venture capital- ist and former Wind Mobile CEO Anthony Lacavera at- tributed corporate Canada's smallness to an "aspiration gap"—a lack of imagination and ambition he sees as en- grained in Canadian culture— combined with a regulatory framework that favours stabil- ity over competition. Other observers point to Canadian entrepreneurs' readiness to sell out to larger competitors. Finlayson blames a policy framework across Canada that favours small businesses—for example, B.C.'s corporate tax rate of 2 percent on the first half million dollars of income, which jumps to 12 percent above that level, and payroll taxes such as the provincial employer health tax, which only kicks in when the en- terprise reaches an annual payroll of $500,000. "The Canadian regime of business taxation tends to incentivize companies to stay small," he says, "for reasons rooted in political calculation. But it's fundamentally counterpro- ductive to building a high- wage, high-income economy." Mind you, no policy rever- sal on this front would mani- fest fast enough to get B.C.'s economy off the tracks of the COVID train headed our way. Helping SMEs sell their goods and services online is one of the best things governments can do in the short term, says Ratté, "since it facilitates the gain of market shares, often in other jurisdictions," which usually correlates with organi- zational growth. Ultimately, B.C.'s economy will recover like everywhere else. "Fortunately, we have high rates of business forma- tion and an entrepreneurial environment," the BCBC's Finlayson says. "I'm confident that once we're through this nightmare, we'll see lots of business startups and certain companies coming into the market." • G O F I G U R E Who's Calling the Shots Provincial and U.S. elections, oversight by Zoom, daily health authority guidance—we had to think a lot about leadership last year, so let's kick off 2021 with a local look at the view from the top by Melissa Edwards 233,600 people work as a manager in B.C., g 12.3% from 2015 13.4% of Canada's managers 35.5% of B.C. managers are women 6,500 are in a senior position, j 8.4% from 2015 1 Canada's ranking (tied with France) among G7 countries in the 2019/20 Reykjavik Index, which measures attitudes about women in leadership 59% of Canadians are very comfortable with a female head of government 62% are very comfortable with a female CEO of a major Canadian company Women occupy 6% of corporate board seats in Canada Global average: 8% Racialized people comprise 48.9% of the population of Metro Vancouver but only 12.3% of all board positions That's still the 2nd-highest level of representation in Canada, after Toronto