The Government of Canada, through the Department of Innovation, Science, and Economic Development (ISED) has announced the 50-30 Challenge (“the Challenge”) whereby participating companies and not-for-profits will voluntarily take action to achieve improvements in support of diversity and inclusion within their organizations.The goal of the program is to challenge Canadian organizations to increase representation, participation, and inclusion of diverse groups on corporate boards and/or in senior management.Companies that participate in the challenge, shall work towards:Gender parity (“50%”) on Board(s) and/or senior management, and;Significant representation (“30%”) on Board(s) and/or senior management of equity-deserving groups, including racialized, Black and/or People of Colour, people living with disabilities and members of the 2SLGBTQ+ community and/or gender and sexually diverse individuals. Participants will also be invited to recognize First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples’ as founding peoples of Canada and under-represented in positions of economic influence and leadership.As an initial step of this project, SCC contracted the Diversity Institute to deliver a first Publicly Available Specification (PAS) on terms and definitions for the 50/30 Challenge. The PAS was developed through a series of consultations with Canadian stakeholders with the goal of building consensus on the terms and definitions of the 50/30 Challenge and their application.For phase 2 of the work, ISED has identified their certification objectives for the Challenge which will require two distinct deliverables:A Publicly Available Specification (PAS) to set the guidance for first-party certification/self-assessment; andA Technical Specification (TS) to set the requirements for third-party certificationSCC is seeking one developer for both deliverables. Both deliverables are expected to be developed in parallel and in partnership with SCC.The selected developer will ensure that the process is transparent, consensus-based, and bottom-up. The successful bidder will leverage the PAS titled “The 50-30 Challenge”, as a seed document to inform their work.
