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While the exact meaning of “diversity” is not specified in the bill, it’s probably easy to surmise what Trudeau and the Liberals have in mind. And besides, what really matters is that the legislation be aspirational.

The real problem here is not so much Bill C-25 itself – which is a noble (albeit clumsy and top-down) attempt to address a challenging and complex topic – but rather the government’s tendency to rely on misleading research in promoting it. Despite Trudeau’s claim that there is a clear link between corporate board diversity and firm performance, the actual evidence paints a much more complicated picture. It is a picture the Liberals ignore to the detriment of positive progress on this file.

While there is certainly ample research showing a positive relationship between, for instance, gender diversity on corporate boards and the tendency of firms to improve their “social performance,” a group of researchers in Europe suggested recently that, in certain contexts, achieving this does not require a “critical mass of female directors,” and that the same results can be achieved with the introduction of only one single woman. In addition to this, there is also empirical evidence suggesting that gender diversity has little influence on the market performance of firms.

And, perhaps most alarmingly, a group of researchers in Scandinavia – a world leader in gender diversity on corporate boards – has highlighted how, in some cases, forcing gender diversity quotas on companies can have the perverse effect of reducing board diversity in other areas, such as cultural, socio-economic and demographic. These are, at best, mixed findings, and they highlight the extent to which Trudeau’s claims about the “research” are, at best, misleading. Again, it’s those pesky details.