Illustration by Stephanie Singleton
In 2020, the brutal murder of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer sparked a global racial reckoning. The subsequent social pressure mobilized hundreds of companies to turn their attention to anti-Black systemic racism. Company budgets for diversity, equity and inclusion measures were expanded. Employers signed diversity pledges in droves, scrambling to show their support for racialized employees. New positions for chief diversity officers were created and filled.
And in Canada, the BlackNorth Initiative was launched by prominent Bay Street financier Wes Hall – rallying almost 500 companies and non-profits to commit to boosting the number of Black employees in their ranks.
Five years later, it is undeniable that the enthusiasm employers once had for diversity projects has waned considerably, according to human resources executives and DEI experts – people whose portfolios and influence grew substantially in the period following the summer of 2020.
The Globe and Mail’s latest survey of BlackNorth signatories points to the same trend, with far fewer companies responding to survey questions about their diversity progress than in prior recent years. The small number that did disclose data demonstrated a clear commitment to the issue, with many meeting or surpassing the five-year goals they set in 2021. But with just 16 per cent of companies responding to the survey this year, the scope of change to DEI initiatives is still unclear, five years after companies rushed to sign onto the BlackNorth pledge.
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Experts say they are seeing the waning interest throughout boardrooms in much of corporate Canada and America, rooted in the murky legal landscape of U.S. President Donald Trump’s ban on DEI programs and a broader sense of fatigue toward race and equity issues.
“It’s not the hot, new, shiny thing anymore,” said Tanya Sinclair, founder of the Black Human Resources Professionals of Canada, a non-profit dedicated to the advancement of Black Canadians in the human resources sector. “Apathy set in very quickly. Now in 2025, it has almost become taboo to be working on diversity-focused initiatives.”
Because of its reach, the BlackNorth Initiative has become a benchmark for gauging the extent to which Canadian employers are committed to DEI in the post-2020 era.
Upon its launch in June, 2020, BlackNorth quickly became the go-to diversity program for corporate leaders to support. Part of the appeal was in its founder: Mr. Hall was born and raised in Jamaica, and charted a meteoric rise through the ranks of predominantly white Bay Street in the early 2000s, positioning his company, Kingsdale Advisors, as a strategic shareholder advisory firm in major takeover battles.
Wes Hall, executive chairman of Kingsdale Advisors and founder of the BlackNorth Initiative, in 2020.Fred Lum/the Globe and Mail
Within weeks of launching BlackNorth, Mr. Hall garnered more than 200 signatories ranging from government entities to non-profits, and much of Bay Street. That number grew to 481 by 2022 and has remained steady since.
Within a five-year time frame from 2020, signatories committed to the overarching goal of improving racial diversity within their employee base and undoing systemic anti-Black racism within workforces that often stunts the careers of Black employees and shuts them out of prominent positions.
Specifically, companies were challenged to commit to a seven-pronged pledge over five years, including promises to have at least 3.5 per cent of board and executive roles occupied by Black people by 2025, and ensure Black student hires make up 5 per cent of the overall intern population of a workplace. Signatories also committed to investing at least 3 per cent of corporate donations in organizations that create economic opportunities in the Black community.
Four times since the launch of BlackNorth, The Globe and Mail has conducted surveys of signatories of the pledge, assessing them on these metrics. Companies, however are often reluctant to publicly disclose detailed progress.
Of those who responded over the past five years, many had indeed made strides in improving the overall proportion of Black and racialized hires in their organizations. But there was less evidence that non-white employees were retained for long after they were hired, or elevated within the corporate hierarchy. Signatories were often quick to create internal DEI councils or groups to study the issue of improving racial equity in an organization, but it was unclear what these councils ultimately ended up achieving in terms of undoing systemic bias and paving the way for long-lasting cultural change.
The final iteration of The Globe’s survey, conducted in 2025, found many of the same patterns.
Critically, there was a sharp drop in the number of signatories willing to share their diversity metrics. Of the 481 companies that The Globe reached out to, only 16 per cent, or 77 companies responded, down from 124 companies in 2023 and 209 companies in 2021.
Of the small proportion of companies that responded, many have met or surpassed the commitments they made.
Overall, in 2025, the median percentage of Black employees among respondents was 6 per cent, up from 5 per cent in 2023 and 3.8 per cent in 2020, before companies signed the BlackNorth pledge. The median percentage of Black executives was 3.7 per cent, up from 1 per cent in 2023 and 0 per cent in 2020.
Of the 64 respondents that have boards of directors, the median percentage of Black board members and directors is 5 per cent, significantly up from 2 per cent in 2023 and 0 per cent in 2020. About a third (21) said they had no Black board members and 15 declined to provide information or said they do not know.
“Corporations have an incredibly influential voice on this issue, so I’m not surprised that as DEI initiatives were rolled back, fewer of them were open to having this conversation publicly,” said Raphael Tachie, a partner at Dentons LLP and the former president of the Canadian Association of Black Lawyers.
Notably, only two of the Big Five banks – Bank of Montreal and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce – responded to The Globe’s survey about how they have met their commitments to the BlackNorth pledge, five years after its launch.
Canada’s big banks are often regarded as trendsetters of major cultural shifts that take place in corporate Canada, but only three major banks signed on to the BlackNorth pledge when it first launched. The third signatory, Bank of Nova Scotia, did not respond to the Globe’s survey.
All three still remain signatories of the initiative, according to current information on BlackNorth’s website.
CIBC reported this year that more than 5 per cent of its work force in Canada consists of Black employees, while approximately 48.4 per cent of employees are Black, Indigenous and other people of colour. In 2021, BIPOC employees made up 35 per cent of the work force; 3.5 per cent were Black.
Today, Black employees account for approximately 3 per cent of executive roles at CIBC (unchanged from 2021), and 23 per cent of executive roles are held by BIPOC. The bank has one Black board member.
BMO disclosed that it had one Black board member (out of 13) while Black employees filled 2.3 per cent of senior leadership roles. Approximately 27 per cent of senior leadership roles at the bank consisted of people of colour.
In 2021, BMO reported it had zero Black board members in Canada, but did not provide any other numerical data to individual questions on their diversity metrics. However, the bank said in 2021 it had met its own internal annual “milestone goals” and was on track to achieve the 2025 goal of “3.5 per cent Black colleagues in senior leadership roles in Canada and 7 per cent in the U.S.”
Ms. Sinclair, from Black Human Resources Professionals, notes that BlackNorth was ultimately one of the most successful DEI initiatives because Mr. Hall was able to leverage his position on Bay Street to get the biggest companies in Canada sign up for the pledge.
“He had, I believe, the ability to challenge Canadian executives in the C-suite to commit to the cause. These high-ranking individuals usually leave matters like diversity to their staff closer to the ground,” she said.
The Globe and Mail is also a signatory of the BlackNorth pledge. In 2025, 3 per cent of the organization’s employee base identified as Black and 29 per cent identified as BIPOC, up from 25 per cent in 2020. The Globe has no Black directors on its board, unchanged from previous years.
BlackNorth’s own survey of its signatories found that in 2025, Black board representation was 3.3 per cent, among TSX-listed BNI signatories, up from under 1 per cent in 2020, according to a July, 2025, press release.
In an e-mail to the Globe, the organization said that the numbers show progress but also “make clear where Canada still has work to do.”
Pako Tshiamala, a diversity consultant who runs his own agency in Toronto called Blink Equity, praised the BlackNorth Initiative for putting diversity on the corporate agenda. “DEI programs do not really work without a community of champions, and it takes highly respected leaders like Wes to engage corporate leaders in a way that gets them even to acknowledge, let alone prioritize, overcoming systemic racism,” he said.
But he, too, noted that there has been a remarkable shift in the DEI landscape, and a decreased demand from employers for services like racial equity audits, diversity audits and consulting services that focus on attracting and retaining racialized talent.
“This is concerning for us because businesses are no longer seeing DEI as a business imperative in Canada. At the end of the day, racism, sexism, bias and discrimination have not stopped despite DEI fatigue or Trump’s executive orders,” Mr. Tshiamala said.
In February, Bay Street law firm McCarthy Tétrault LLP paused a hiring program for Black and Indigenous law students that had been credited internally for diversifying the firm’s pool of associates. In a statement to The Globe at the time, McCarthy’s said its decision to pause the program was part of a strategic review of its overall recruitment process.
The firm, a BlackNorth signatory, has seen an increase in the percentage of Black employees since signing the initiative in 2020 (from less than 1 per cent, according to 2023 data, to 3 per cent currently) and a corresponding increase in the number of BIPOC employees over the last five years (from 19 per cent in 2023 to 24 per cent currently). The company also stated, in its survey responses, that Black employees make up 6 per cent of executive roles in its company.
But Mr. Tachie said it was nevertheless unfortunate that McCarthy’s decided to pause a “fantastic” program. “Getting into these law firms earlier, as a student, allows you to learn how they work and increase your chances of getting hired back. The fact that McCarthy suspended the program tells me that something has really changed within the firm.”
When Mr. Tachie was president of the Canadian Association of Black Lawyers in 2020, he said there were numerous inquiries from organizations wanting to partner with CABL. But towards the end of his term, in late 2023, he got a sense that the environment around diversity issues had shifted.
“The commitment was simply not the same. As contracts with us were coming to an end, the conversations around renewing commitments were very different compared to 2020,” he said.
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Mr. Tshiamala believes companies simply do not allocate the same kind of internal budget to DEI projects as they did in the past, partly because they are worried about external blowback.
“Champions who once stood tall for DEI are no longer as bold and present as before. There is fear among executives that they may come under attack by anti-DEI proponents,” he added.
In the face of the corporate world’s diminishing interest towards diversity-related issues, what then, is the future of organizations that have championed them?
Mr. Hall, who responded to questions from The Globe via e-mail, pushed back against the notion that Bay Street has retreated from DEI, instead suggesting that there has been a deeper focus by companies on measurement and accountability.
BlackNorth launched Pledge 2.0 this past July, encouraging companies that had already signed the first pledge to renew their commitments. Specifically, the organization is calling on companies to commit to annual surveys and track their commitments to diversity and equity. Approximately 90 per cent of signatories have renewed their commitment to BlackNorth, and fewer than 10 per cent have departed, noted Mr. Hall.
Multiple former signatories of the BlackNorth pledge told The Globe that they had stopped engaging with BlackNorth after finding that the organization did not provide strategic help and was not responsive to questions – yet BlackNorth frequently asked for donations for its programs. (BlackNorth is a non-profit that receives funding from some of its signatories. In 2021, Fairfax Financial donated $1-million to the organization.)
In 2022, BlackNorth executive director Dahabo Ahmed-Omer told The Globe that a large proportion of the organization’s funding came directly from signatories. The organization employs roughly 20 full-time staff, according to the e-mail it sent to The Globe.
Dahabo Ahmed-Omer, executive director of the BlackNorth Initiative, in Toronto in 2021.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
BlackNorth did not respond to specific questions about the help it provides to signatories or why some signatories might have pulled out of the initiative.
Ms. Sinclair said that often, companies rely on DEI organizations like BlackNorth to “hold their hand” and specifically tell them what to do and how to do it, but that is not a sustainable way to create meaningful change within a workplace. “BlackNorth cannot be leading the charge. Workplaces need to find a way to embed diversity into their culture, with clear intention.”
Mr. Tshiamala argues that diversity groups tend to be scapegoated for failures that exist within corporations to attract and retain racialized employees.
“The turnover in roles like chief diversity officers or diversity managers is problematic,” he said.
“The lack of continuity in the role results in programs that lack continuity and fail to achieve the goals organizations intended for them. So a non-profit like BlackNorth that operates at arm’s length lacks the capacity to succeed where corporations themselves fail.”