Keynote Speaker
Opening Speech
His peers have acknowledged Douglas as one of the “Best Class Action Lawyers in Canada”. He is also one of Canada’s leading constitutional lawyers, with over a dozen Supreme Court cases to his credit. Douglas has been a leading counsel in many landmark lesbian and gay rights cases, including Vriend v. Alberta, Little Sisters Bookstore v. Canada, M. v. H., Marc Hall v. Durham Separate School Board, Halpern v Canada, Hislop v Canada and the Reference Re Same Sex Marriage. His clients have included pioneering gay activists like George Hislop and community organizations such as the Canadian AIDS Society and EGALE. Douglas has been an active volunteer, and has served on numerous boards such as the first elected Board of the AIDS Committee of Toronto. He has often served in leadership roles, including serving as the founding president of the International Lesbian and Gay Law Association. Douglas has received numerous awards for his work, most recently Pride Toronto’s Lifetime Achievement Award that was presented to him by Premier McGuinty. Douglas is proud to have been “out on Bay Street” for over 25 years Workshop SeriesWorkshop #1 : Mentorship Matters Derek Nighbor We all need mentors. This workshop will look at issues ranging from how to find a mentor to how to maintain that relationship. Most importantly, we will discuss the tools required to ensure you are prepared to be a mentor to someone else someday. Workshop #2 : Navigating International Waters William Bila, Ryan Doornbos & Zev Lowe, Are you Interested in pursuing a career outside Canada? What are the challenges you will be facing as an LGBT person? The Navigating International Waters panel will bring together professionals who will discuss their professional and personal experiences and answer questions on diversity and career development. Joanne Cohen This workshop by noted same-sex rights advocate and socio-legal scholar Joanne Cohen will discuss practical techniques to empower young LGBTQ professionals in corporate environments. Basic legal rights and social equality and respect are new to many of us, as is our awareness of the need to protect our rights and relationships through wills, powers of attorney, and appropriate estate and life planning. As young professionals in the workplace, our informal understanding of human rights law and employment entitlements may sometimes conflict with real-world workplace scenarios and challenges. How might we deal with issues of anti-LGBTQ harassment or abusive speech in the workplace, hostile work climates, or potential cases of discrimination or wrongful dismissal? What are the most effective and time-tested techniques to defend one’s reasonable rights to fair opportunity, equity, health and dignity? What are the wider social trends affecting how ‘out’ GLBTQ employees and professionals will be perceived on Bay Street? What are the most effective ways to build respect and rapport as well as your professional reputation and ‘bottom line’ as an LGBTQ professional in a mixed or traditional corporate environment? This formal presentation will be followed by interactive audience discussion and questions. Workshop #4 : Corporate Social Responsibility Milé Komlen, Director of Human Rights and Equity Services, McMaster University – Hamilton What is the role of business in advancing LGBT issues? How does the corporate structure engage and support the LGBT community? We will discuss how companies integrate LGBT issues into their overall social responsibility programs and explore the highlights and challenges of the efforts. We will look at diversity recruiting, inclusion initiatives, community engagement, and strategic partnerships, all with the goal of finding out how corporations care about LGBT constituents. Workshop #5 : What about the ‘T’?: Trans issues in the workplace Annemarie Shrouder, Janice Clanfield & Matthias Kaay As the acronym suggests, Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transgender persons are often lumped together under one umbrella. While queer rights have come a long way in the last 40 years, the recognition and support of Trans rights is lagging behind.
Workshop #6 : The impacts of Gay/Lesbian populations on regional prosperity Kevin Stolarick PhD “The Rise of the Creative Class” was released in 2002 and gained a popularity that continues to grow. Measures like “creativity index” and “gay index” and “melting pot index”, especially being applied to individual regions, garnered both practitioner and media attention. In today’s modern creative economy, knowledge and innovation are the key. Those who generate those advances are both more mobile and more demanding of the place they are willing to call home. Countries, states, and regions need to compete for talent at least as much as they have been competing to attract firms and industries. Today’s economy is driven by creativity, and the holders of that creativity or “the creative class” drive regional prosperity. Tolerance and diversity play important roles in both attracting people to a region as well as maximizing the realized potential within a region. The “Gay/Lesbian Index” is an excellent measure of regional inclusiveness. As a group, gays have been subject to a particularly high level of discrimination. Attempts by gays to integrate into the mainstream of society have met substantial opposition. To some extent, homosexuality represents the last frontier of diversity in our society, and thus a place that welcomes the gay community welcomes all kinds of people. For these reasons, openness to the gay community is a good indicator of the low entry barriers to creative capital that are so important to spurring creativity and generating high-tech growth. The index is a very strong predictor of a region’s high-tech industry concentration and high-tech industry growth. The reason is not that gays are particularly prevalent in high-tech industries. It simply represents a leading indicator of a place that is open and tolerant. These qualities are important to high-tech workers and creative class people. Many are immigrants or people moving from one region of the country to another. Some grew up being stereotyped as nerds; some have extravagant habits and dress. All want places where they can fit in and live as they please without raising eyebrows. Places that are open and accepting to gays are the kinds of places in which recent immigrants and other members of the creative class will also feel welcome. Openness to diversity is seen as openness to all kinds of things: new ideas, intellectual freedom, risk tolerance, an entrepreneurial spirit, and a willingness to let people “be themselves” Workshop #7 : Diversity – The Competitive Edge Wendy Cukier PhD The Business Case for Diversity and Social Innovation. Workshop #8 : The LGBT Edge S Bear Bergman and j wallace Find out how being queer relates to real-life professional skills. The coming out process often involves creating a support network, undertaking a rigorous process of education and training, cross-cultural communication, and renegotiating unwritten contracts. A gender transition involves managing a budget, medical research, and investigation of laws and statutes. These are more than just transferable skills — they’re a testament to our determination, resilience, and other qualities that make stellar professionals. Workshop Speakers
Derek is Retail Council of Canada’s Senior Vice President, National Affairs and has been with RCC since July 2005.
Will Bila is a Senior Consultant in the Human Capital Practice at Deloitte. He holds an IMBA with a concentration in Organizational Behaviour from the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business and a Bachelor of Science in Finance and International Business from New York University’s Stern School of Business.
Ryan is the Director of New Products and Businesses for Grail Research, Monitor Group’s center of excellence for research and analytics. Prior to joining Grail Research, Ryan spent several years as a consultant and project manager for Monitor Group.
Joanne Cohen is an internationally published legal scholar and community advocate in Toronto. She is responsible for the formation, grant funding, political and media strategy, and successful legal interventions of the Coalition of Canadian Liberal Rabbis for Same-Sex Marriage for same-sex equality and religious freedoms in the same-sex marriage cases at the BC and Ontario Courts of Appeal (2003), Supreme Court of Canada (2004) and Parliament of Canada (2003 and 2005), culminating in the passage of Canada’s same-sex marriage law, Bill C-38 in July 2005, and the defeat of Prime Minister Harper’s motion to revisit this divisive debate in Parliament on Dec. 7, 06.
MBA 2009 Candidate, Co-President of ESADE Pride Network
Annemarie Shrouder Annemarie Shrouder is a diversity and inclusion consultant and the founder and President of Building Equitable Environments – a company that helps organizations create workplace environments that value and acknowledge diversity.
Dubbed the “Official Statistician of the Creative Class”, Kevin Stolarick, PhD, combines a depth of knowledge with an appreciation of the importance of finding and sharing the knowledge or “pearls of wisdom” gained from his comprehensive understanding of the Creative Class and the Creative Economy. He is Research Director at The Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto
Wendy Cukier is the Associate Dean, of the Ted Rogers School of Business, Ryerson University, Canada’s largest undergraduate business school, where she is responsible for research, accreditation and two new MBA degrees. She is also the Founder of The Diversity Institute which researches barriers to under-represented groups and ways of increasing their participation in the workplace.
S. Bear Bergman is an author, (www.sbearbergman.com) a theatre artist, an instigator, and a good example of what happens when you overeducate a contrarian. He is also the author of Butch Is a Noun (Suspect Thoughts Press, 2006) and three award-winning solo performances.
j wallace is the Diversity Coordinator for the Halton District School Board and a member of Eagle’s Education Policy team. An experienced educational policy specialist with more than a decade’s experience working on queer and trans-inclusion issues in school settings, j has recently taken up directorship of the first-ever national GSA organization in Canada. Image Clinic Amy Verner, Globe Style – www.globeandmail.com Resume and Interview Clinic Faridah Hemani & Glen Matadeen, Rotman School of Business On the second day of the conference the delegates will have the opportunity to meet with sponsoring companies at the career fair. Through the resume and interview clinics, students will have a chance to get a last minute tips on how to market and present themselves to the prospective employers. Bring your resumes to the clinic and forward them to Out on Bay Street as well. The resumes will be provided to the companies that will attend the carrer fair.
Faridah Hemani is Assistant Director at Corporate Connections Centre at the Rotman School of Management. She has been working in the field of Human Resources, training and career development primarily in healthcare and education industry, since she completed her MBA from Simon Fraser University in 2000.
Glen has been a Career Educator for the past 15 years and worked and U of T’s main Career Centre for 12 of those years. He joined the Rotman Corporate Connections Centre in May 2008. His specialty is career coaching and counselling and works with recruiters in financial services. Panel Speakers2008 Diversity Panel: “It’s OK to be Out on Bay Street” Featuring:
In 2005, André commence his current position with the Toronto Police Service to implement strategic organizational change in cultural competency and diversity.
Dan Chiu has been on “Bay Street” since 1991. He was most recently the Director of Capital Markets at the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, where he built his 25 person team from scratch and was responsibility for all trading and short horizon value-add public market strategies of the fund. Prior to CPPIB, he held roles in both sales and trading at CIBC World Markets and TD Securities (U.K.).
Zahra is a fierce, flamboyant, stylish, spiritual, sexy spin-sister on a mission to bring joy and justice to everything she does. She is a lawyer, a dj, a performer, a healer, a feminist, a glam queen, a lover of life. www.zahradhanani.com
Mathieu Chantelois is a 35-year-old “Torontonian/Montrealer”. He has a Masters Degree in Journalism from Carleton University in Ottawa. Mathieu also completed two years of his PhD, probing the roots of circuit parties and tackling the evolution of gay body culture. |
Mark Tewksbury
R. Douglas Elliott
Derek Nighbor
William Bila
Ryan Doornbos
Joanne Cohen
Zev Lowe
Kevin Stolarick PhD
Wendy Cukier PhD
S Bear Bergman
j wallace
Faridah Hemani
Glen Matadeen
André Goh
Dan Chiu
Zahra Dhanani
Mathieu Chantelois