Babies & boards
Perhaps Simon Murray, the recently appointed chairman of mining and commodity-trading giant Glencore International AG, was mountaineering -one of his many macho hobbies -when then Harvard president Lawrence Summers drew modern liberal wrath in 2005 by suggesting that there might be biological reasons for women being "underrepresented" at the highest levels of math and physics.
Mr. Murray must have been unfamiliar with the uproar, because otherwise he would surely not have allowed himself to comment on corporate board quotas for women, as he did in an interview with last weekend's Sunday Telegraph.
The refreshingly outspoken 71-year-old Mr. Murray, who is less than two weeks into his new job, outraged the U.K.'s sensitive classes not for his attack on "economically shambolic" and EU-dominated Blighty, with its spoon-fed entitlements. He started straying into dangerous territory around the time he said, "When I was a boy, our heroes were Livingstone and Nelson." He should have thrown in Florence Nightingale. Mr. Murray then proceeded to put his blind eye to the public relations telescope when asked his view on enforcing quotas for women in the boardroom, as recommended in a recent U.K. report.
"Women in the boardroom?" he responded. "Terrific. Why not? Always welcome. But why make a special case out of it? Why tell everybody you've got to have X number of women in the boardroom?" Having made this controversial -although entirely valid -point, he stepped into Summers land by declaring of women that "they're not so ambitious in business as men because they've better things to do. Quite often they like bringing up their children and all sorts of other things." He then said "Pregnant ladies have nine months off."
Mr. Murray seems to have missed the memo that any suggestion that pregnancy or child rearing might have any impact on a woman's career choice, or on a firm's productivity, is now utterly taboo. Similarly, the notion that men might tend to be more prepared to commit themselves to the long hours and demanding schedules of corporate ladder climbing, and thus wind up "overrepresented," is unmentionable.
The ululating eunuchs of political correctness were soon bearing down on Mr. Murray. British Business Secretary Vince Cable declared "I think his comments show an extremely primitive attitude and are completely unacceptable.. His views are so bad they almost sound like a wind-up [a deliberate joke provocation]."
Similarly highly dudgeoned was former British trade minister Lord Davies, producer of the aforementioned report on the paucity of women directors (Discovering that only one in 12 British board members was a woman, Lord Davies demanded that companies make one-quarter of their directors women by 2015, otherwise quotas might be coming). "For someone of his stature to be making those comments is unforgivable," hyperventilated Lord Davies. "They are comments from 20 or 30 years ago." They were ideological bell-bottom pants!
Sir Roger Carr, chairman of Centrica PLC, rushed into the fray to demonstrate his own stout feminist credentials -and how far the glass-ceiling issue had destroyed people's ability to think logically. "Simon Murray's comments frankly just miss the point," said Sir Roger. "In the past few years there has been an awakening about why women on boards are a good thing."
But didn't Mr. Murray say that women in the boardroom was "terrific?" What he said was that quotas were a bad idea. Plus the unmentionable baby thing.
Mr. Murray rapidly saw the error of his views. "I apologize for any offence caused by my comments regarding the role of women in business," he grovelled. "I'm 100% committed to equal opportunities in the boardroom and across a company's structure be they private or public. Businesses which fail to address the underrepresentation of women at all levels will be at a competitive disadvantage."
But what dinosaur could not be committed to equal opportunities for women? The issue is whether equal opportunities are likely to lead to "underrepresentation," which is a much thornier issue. Mr. Murray's real offence was to suggest that biology might make a difference.
Major potential investors have raised flags over the timing of Glencore's mammoth planned US$60-billion public offering, the nature of the shares being offered, the composition of the board, and even of the timing of the appointment of Mr. Murray, but they haven't suggested that the absence of women from the board -at least for the moment -is likely to be a problem. Nor is it evidence of systemic prejudice.
Despite the anachronistic presence of both dinosaurs and cavemen in executive suites, the market punishes those who allow gender or other biases to prevent them hiring the best people for any job. It also presumably punishes those who adopt quota systems to be politically correct.
How many women should be on boards? As many as are qualified, inclined and invited. That number is likely to increase over time, but enforced "parity" is a mistaken, even noxious, notion.
Patti Hausmann has pointed out that women are in general less fascinated than men with "ohms, carburetors or quarks." Perhaps they tend to be less interested in the thickets of corporate governance and threats of directorial jail time too.
Many boards are in fact desperate to find qualified -and interested -women. However, as Mr. Murray said, quotas are a mistake. His problem was that he should never have brought up babies.
The perils of protest votes
Until this week, the Conservatives' coalition warnings focused on the dangers of a Liberal-led government, propped up by the separatist Bloc Québécois. But what if a coalition government were led not by the Liberals, but by the NDP? Given the opinion polls that show the NDP running strong with the Liberals in English Canada, and with the BQ in Quebec, such a scenario is no longer out of the question.
What would an NDP-led coalition mean for Canada? Instead of playing second fiddle to the Liberals, NDP policies would stand front and centre. These include a spate of anti-business measures such as capping credit card interest rates, hiking corporate tax rates and throwing up barriers to foreign investment. The impact of such policies on Canada's economy would be disastrous, not only in the long term, but immediately, as they would send a signal to international markets that Canada is no longer open for business. The strong Canadian dollar, our favourable credit rating and efforts of previous government to open foreign markets would all be put at risk, resulting in a weaker economy, slower growth and reduced job creation.
It is understandable that many Canadians, fatigued by Parliament's bickering and gamesmanship, would want to register a protest vote. It is also understandable that non-separatist Quebec voters would eventually drift away from the Bloc. But given the way the numbers are starting to add up, voting for the NDP will be more than just a symbolic gesture of protest: It could serve to elect a government with an agenda far to the left of anything Canada has seen since the Trudeau era. The Canadians now flocking to the NDP would be well-served to ask themselves whether these are the policies they really want for their country.
An insult to our intelligence
For many years, Elections Canada has banned the broadcast of regional election results before polls are closed on the West coast. This policy always has been baseless and silly. But in the age of Facebook and Twitter, it is utterly indefensible.
If you live in St. John's or Montreal or Etobicoke or Winnipeg, and on Monday night you have the audacity to tweet your followers with the results from your riding before voters in Vancouver and Victoria finish casting their ballots, you will be liable for a fine of up to $25,000, and imprisonment -yes, imprisonment -of up to five years.
We are not making this up. It is actually the law. Not in Belarus. But in Canada.
If you post a regional election result on your Facebook wall -even something as innocuous as, "The NDP is on its way to a landslide win in Outremont" -Elections Canada may lay charges, even if only a single Facebook friend or Twitter follower can see the posting. In recent days, the agency's officials have gone out of their way to warn Canadians explicitly about using social media for this purpose.
For more than 70 years, it has been the paternalistic belief of our national election regulators that posting the results from one time zone before the results are available from all times zones is unfair to those in the West. The underlying presumption is that voters are too feeble-minded to make up their own minds about how to vote if they know the results from other regions first.
When the Supreme Court upheld the "premature communications" ban in 2007, Justice Rosalie Abella wrote the dissenting opinion. The majority of justices were wrong, she argued, to prevent ordinary Canadians from posting early results online because "there is only speculative and unpersuasive evidence to support the government's claim that the information imbalance is of sufficient harm to voter behaviour or perceptions of electoral unfairness that it outweighs any damage done to a fundamental and constitutionally protected right" of free expression. We don't usually agree with Justice Abella (a left-wing Ontario appointee once described as Canada's "quota queen"). But in this case, she was bang on.
The irony is that this policy gets ignored all the time -by American-based bloggers, for instance, who are out of the grasp of Elections Canada's legal reach. So people who really want early election results can get them. And on Monday night, there no doubt will be many Canadian social-media users who post early regional election results because they don't know the practice is illegal. Meanwhile, reputable media outlets will obey the law, and be penalized as a result.
The "premature communications" ban is a violation of free speech rights, an insult to Canadians' collective intelligence and an obsolete vestige of a dirigiste nanny-state. It should be scrapped as the first order of business of whoever wins Monday's election.
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