By: Marlon Moreno
Maureen Sabia is as iconic as Canadian Tire, the company she oversees as the current Chairman of the Board. As well, she is one of Canada’s 100 Most Influential Woman according to the Women’s Executive Network. I let her know during our visit how pleased I was to have the opportunity to interview the current chairperson of Canadian Tire. Maureen quickly corrected me, wanting it to be clearly understood that she is the Chairman not the Chairperson. Maureen strenuously objects to being described as a chairwoman or chairperson, and remarked, “I have no patience with words like leadership being modified by the word woman… leadership is sex neutral”, she says, “it can be practiced by men and women alike, just as law and medicine and engineering can be. Both men and women can be good at what they do or they can be bad, but they are not inherently good or bad because of their sex".
Her thoughts on leadership and gender led to my next question “What type of feminist are you? I asked, she replied with no hesitation “I am a classical feminist, one who believes in equality of opportunity and not equality of results.” Maureen believes that the left wing feminist movement has high-jacked the feminist agenda and it has become an impediment rather than a solution to having more women in leadership roles. “Woman are good for business and make no mistake about it,” she says. “Women should never have agreed to become part of the affirmative action agenda.” Despite the fact that the original idea of these initiatives was to develop a way to move things forward, she believes “it is more now about quotas, reports on numbers or simply recruiting more women for the sake of ticking a box or meeting a minimum threshold.”
Opinionated and determined are words that come to mind while Maureen shares with me her experience applying at Harvard Law School where she hoped to study law. The Dean told her that he could not give her a place in Harvard’s Law School, regardless of the fact that her marks were exceptional, as he believed that her skill as a lawyer and devotion to practicing law would never be as great as that of a man and in good conscience he could not grant her admission for “she would never have to earn her own living and a man would have to.” Maureen was not deterred. She simply thought he was a Neanderthal and proceeded to get herself accepted by the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law.
Although Maureen Sabia is a very public persona, she remains very private and often describes herself as the cat from Rudyard Kipling’s short story, The Cat That Walked by Himself, walking through the lonely, wet and wild woods all by herself. Any regrets, I ask. She pauses and says that “she only wished that she had been born a little later so she could have accomplished so much more.” I ponder this as I leave her office, so private despite Canadian Tire being so public, and cannot help but be in awe of how far she has paved the way for Canadian women and in doing so, how well deserved all her accomplishments are.
