Let’s try a visualization exercise.
Picture, if you can, owning a business.
Scenario one: Picture there are two other owners. Think about what it would be like if one of the three of you purposely hides an important element of their identities.
Scenario two: Picture there are three other owners. Think about what it would be like if one of the four of you suffered lost business opportunities because of their orientation.
Scenario three: Picture there are four other owners. Think about what it would be like if one of the five of you faced discrimination simply by being part of this community.
This is what it is like to be an LGBT+ business owner in Canada.
These businesses employ more than 400,000. Their collective impact approaches $22 billion.
Yet in 2021, in a country that professes acceptance, one in three such owners intentionally shield their orientation. One in three cannot find mentorship as part of their effort to flourish. One in four say they have actually lost contracts just because they are out. Two in five find challenges in gaining access to working capital. One in five face discrimination. One in five have faced challenges succeeding abroad simply for being who they are.
Darrell Schuurman, the co-founder and CEO of the Canadian LGBT+ Chamber of Commerce (CGLCC), refers to these statistics as “startling” and “unfortunate,” and he is being all too polite. It is a basic disgrace, and it is not just elsewhere in Canada. It is here, too.
His Chamber recently commissioned its second national landscape from the Deloitte LLP professional services consultancy to provide this survey data to discuss at its annual (still virtual) convention earlier this month. The research reached out to 2,540 Canadian businesses and found 192, or roughly 8%, self-identified as LGBT+-owned, many of them part of support mechanisms that Schuurmann calls their “shared and common connection.”
The findings on discrimination are most directly affecting that community and its continued frustration in seeking equality of opportunity, but bear in mind there are other broad consequences.
“We have to keep in mind,” Schuurman said, “that LGBT+ businesses, they're creating employment, they're paying taxes. And so, you know, when they're having challenges and barriers to growing their business, that hurts us all.”
It is simplistic, too, to conclude that the intolerance is focused in smaller communities and that the major cities thrive. Schuurman agrees that major centres can be less regressive, but challenges can emerge when an urban business has a rural supplier. He cautions, too, that “sometimes we live in this bubble” in perceiving our cities as progressive, when there are different perspectives and attitudes all over – just as there are LGBT+-owned businesses all over.
It is ironic that many in the LGBT+ community became owners in the first place to develop their own independence, to escape the fear of firing or workplace discrimination they faced elsewhere. It turns out they walked from one set of fears of loss to another.
Laws are often out of step with societal practices, usually behind the times. In this case, it turns out they are ahead of them. Any legal barriers to equality are in this country extinct. It’s the internal attitudes, policies and practices still lagging.
The pandemic hasn’t helped. Research is clear that diverse businesses were hardest hit economically. The Deloitte study indicated more than half of all businesses, even those in the LGBT+ community, don’t have any commitments or strategies to increase diversity in their leadership or staff.
“We’re getting there,” Schuurman says. Corporate partners are recognizing that diversity confers innovation in products and services and that there is an inherent business reason to support them.
At this important time of overlapping conversations on race and reconciliation, “business plays such an important piece helping to create that inclusive and equitable world,” he notes. The research, though, suggests there is much work to do.
“We're not all walking away and troubled by this research, but I see it as a challenge for all of us to say we need to change this.”
Kirk LaPointe is publisher and editor-in-chief of Business in Vancouver and vice-president, editorial, of Glacier Media.
