Regina committee delays vote on federal conversion therapy ban

Regina’s community wellness committee had to delay a vote on conversion therapy legislation Wednesday morning, working its way through a lengthy list of delegates speaking on two resolutions.

The resolutions are: The committee recommend to council for "the Mayor to write to the Federal Government on behalf of Regina City Council in support of Bill C-6,” and the approval of that recommendation at council’s April 28 meeting.

Committee chair and councillor Andrew Stevens (Ward 3) allowed 16 of the 26 scheduled delegates to speak.

By noon they were out of time, prompting Stevens to schedule an additional meeting next week for the remaining speakers.

The federal Bill C-6 had its first reading on Oct. 1 and its second on Dec. 11.

The committee’s documents noted the federal Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights had to amend its definition of conversion therapy, re-introduced at the Dec. 11 reading.

That definition says conversion therapy “means a practice, treatment or service designed to change a person’s sexual orientation to heterosexual, to change a person’s gender or gender expression to cisgender, or to repress or reduce nonheterosexual attraction or sexual behaviour or non-cisgender gender expression.”

The definition also says it doesn’t include “a practice, treatment or service that relates to the exploration and development of an integrated personal identity without favouring any particular sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.”

Emmanuel Sanchez, who grew up in Regina and moved to Calgary in January 2020, is one of the delegates who spoke opposing the resolutions based on Ottawa’s definition of conversion therapy.

“I would absolutely get on board and support a federal conversion therapy ban, as long as it is worded correctly and truly bans the things they're trying to ban,” he told the Leader-Post.

His critique is the proposed ban only allows for affirmative-type counselling, while prohibiting counselling work that challenges a client.

Sanchez, now a youth pastor, cited his personal story as an example.

He grew up in his Regina church community with same-sex attractions, eventually having gay relationships when he turned 16.

Trying to understand himself, he sought counselling from a therapist who affirmed his gay identity, but didn’t alleviate his anxiety, depression or suicidal wishes.

Sanchez said another therapist, a church pastor “who neither affirmed nor condemned my choices,” helped him work through his mental health struggles.

Following his Christian faith, he has chosen to live a celibate life while seeing therapists to work through his same-sex attractions.

Since Calgary passed a municipal bylaw banning conversion therapy last May, Sanchez has been denied services.

“I still require support and counsel to help me live the life I've chosen,” he said. “I've been denied by (counselling agencies), because it has to do with helping me to live a celibate life.”

Wednesday’s resolutions don’t, as of yet, seek to create a municipal bylaw banning conversion therapy, like what’s been done in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary and Saskatoon.

Sanchez encouraged the committee, if a municipal ban is created, to ensure it respects “the individual's freedom at any age to chose the type of support they want and their desired goals.”

Calgary's bylaw allows for fines of up to $10,000 to be levied against people or businesses who violate it.

eradford@postmedia.com

Evan Radford, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Regina Leader-Post, The Leader-Post

Savings drawdown could add half a percent to global growth: think-tank

PARIS (Reuters) - The global economy could grow half a percentage point faster next year if households spend some of the huge savings they built up during the coronavirus pandemic, a French economic think-tank said on Wednesday

.

© Reuters/FABIAN BIMMER 

Lockdown in the streets of Hamburg

With businesses such as restaurants, cinemas and hotels still closed in many countries, many households in developed countries have accumulated far greater savings than normal.

Whether households start spending these savings or sit on them in anticipation of financial challenges ahead is one of the biggest puzzles facing economists and policymakers as they try to figure out how fast economies will recover from the pandemic.

The OFCE think-tank approached the issue by comparing a scenario for major economies where households spend in 2022 a fifth of the extra savings they built up during 2020 and 2021 with a scenario in which they do not.

Under the first scenario, global economic growth was seen at 4.5% next year and under the second it came out at 4.0%, the OFCE said in an update of its global forecasts.

The U.S. economy was seen achieving growth next year of 5.9% under the first scenario and of 3.7% without the boost from savings being spent down.

Germany, Europe's biggest economy, could see 5.5% growth next year under the first scenario and 4.1% under the second, while French growth would reach 6.0% and 4.3% respectively.

Britain could see growth of 5.0% with a savings drawdown or 3.2% without while Italy was seen at 5.5% and 3.9% respectively.

(Reporting by Leigh Thomas; Editing by Gareth Jones)

DEAD CAPITAL*

Businesses are sitting on record $130B in excess cash, but will they invest it coming out of the pandemic?

THEY DIDN'T INVEST IT PRIOR TO THE PANDEMIC

Bianca Bharti 
FINANCIAL POST

4/ 14/2021    

Canadian businesses are sitting on a record cash pile, but whether and how they spend it may determine the shape of the post-pandemic recovery, according to a recent report from the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

© Provided by Financial Post

In the report, CIBC deputy chief economist Benjamin Tal estimated that businesses are currently sitting on $130 billion in excess cash, a level “above and beyond” what would have been the case without the pandemic.

The report followed the bank’s November estimate that Canadian households — made frugal by lockdowns and layoffs — had accumulated more than $90 billion, in no small part thanks to federal aid programs.

“We know (households) are going to spend part of it and that is one of the reasons we expect a very strong recovery,” Tal told the Financial Post in an interview. Households are expected to lead a seven-per-cent annualized rate of growth in second half of the year, according to the report.

“Now we look at businesses and we found that they sit on even more excess cash. So the question is whether or not this money will be spent to reverse the decline in business investment.”

Tal pointed out that businesses’ participation in Canada’s economic recovery could be limited by a couple of factors.

Canadian households and businesses sitting on $170 billion excess cash hoard: CIBC

Canadian businesses still worry about survival even as the pandemic's end draws closer

One major inhibitor to business investment is the federal government’s Canadian Emergency Business Account program, which provides interest-free loans of up to $40,000 and recently expanded to $60,000. More than 500,000 Canadian businesses have received CEBA support so far, which totals more than $46 billion.

Most of that money will have to be paid back, Tal said, save for $20,000 which will be considered a grant if a businesses pays the rest of the loan back by December next year.

The second inhibitor lies in which sectors performed well during the pandemic.

“Those sectors that were benefitting from the crisis, they don’t really show any significant increase in business investment intentions,” Tal said.

Technology companies and manufacturers, for example, are reluctant to invest more than normal because they anticipate their demand to go down once life returns to normal.

At the same time, sectors that suffered during the pandemic — such as oil and gas — have indicated a need to invest even though their cash reserves plummeted.

“It’s really consistent with the narrative of this crisis, which I (describe) as deep but narrow,” Tal said.

By deep but narrow, he means the impact for sectors is “very deep” for those that experienced losses, but also narrow and limited to a few sectors compared to any other recession.

Mostafa Askari, chief economist at the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy, said once macroeconomic conditions normalize, business investment will pick up. However, until then, consumers will lead the recovery because their desire to spend has been mounting over the course of numerous lockdowns.

“There has to be a view that the economy is going to grow at a healthy pace, that the COVID impact is gone and global conditions are going back to normal,” he said. “All those effects will encourage businesses to increase their investment.”

*A TERM MADE POPULAR BY GOV OF THE BANK OF CANADA; MARK CARNEY

WATER IS LIFE
Epic drought means water crisis on

Oregon-California border


PORTLAND, Ore. — Hundreds of farmers who rely on a massive irrigation project that spans the Oregon-California border learned Wednesday they will get a tiny fraction of the water they need amid the worst drought in decades, as federal regulators attempt to balance the needs of agriculture against federally threatened and endangered fish species that are central to the heritage of several tribes.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Oregon’s governor said the prolonged drought in the region has the “full attention of our offices,” and she is working with congressional delegates, the White House and federal agencies to find relief for those affected.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation briefed irrigators, tribes and environmental groups early Wednesday after delaying the decision a month. The federally owned irrigation project will draw 33,000 acre-feet of water from Upper Klamath Lake, which farmers said was roughly 8% of what they need in such a dry year. Water deliveries will also start June 1, two months later than usual, for the 1,400 irrigators who farm the 225,000 acres (91,000 hectares).

“The simple fact is it just hasn’t rained or snowed this year. We all know how dry our fields are, and the rest of the watersheds are in the same boat. ... There is no easy way to say this,” Ben DuVal, president of the Klamath Water Users Association, told several dozen irrigators who gathered in Klamath Falls on Wednesday morning to hear the news.

“We all know what this is going to mean to our farms, our families and our community as a whole. For some of us, it may mean we’re not in business anymore next year.”

Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat, said in a statement that Oregon water regulators are reviewing a plan to allow irrigators to pump more than twice as much groundwater per acre for their crops as allowed last year when drought reduced water supplies to a lesser extent.

“My message to the people of the Klamath Basin today is this: You are not alone,” said Brown, who has also declared a drought emergency in the region.

The Bureau of Reclamation set aside $15 million in immediate aid for irrigators, and irrigation districts at Wednesday's meeting said they could expect some additional water from two other reservoirs and groundwater wells. Another $10 million will be available for drought assistance from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, following the release of a water operations plan for the Klamath Reclamation Project, according to a news release from Oregon’s U.S. Sens. Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden, with U.S. Rep. Cliff Bentz.

The seasonal allocations are the most dramatic development in the region since irrigation water was all but cut off to hundreds of farmers in 2001 amid another severe drought — the first time the interests of farmers took a backseat to those of fish and tribes.

The crisis made the rural farming region hundreds of miles from any major city a national political flashpoint and became a touchstone for Republicans who used the crisis to take aim at the Endangered Species Act, with one GOP lawmaker calling the irrigation shutoff a “poster child” for why changes were needed. A “bucket brigade” protest attracted 15,000 people who scooped water from the Klamath River and passed it, hand over hand, to a parched irrigation canal.

“My hope is we can all stick together and look to help each other where we can,” said DuVal, who added that his biggest fear is "outsiders coming in and using what we do here and using our crisis as a soapbox for them."

The Yurok Tribe, one of the tribes affected by the water decision, said that even with the slashes to farmers' water, they were facing a “catastrophic loss” of salmon this year.

“The Yurok Tribe is suffering significant economic damage on top of the extreme cultural and social impacts of failing fish runs," said tribal Vice Chairman Frankie Myers.

Jay Weiner, an attorney for the Klamath Tribes, said the tribe was pursuing legal action over water releases that will impact fish and accused the federal government of precipitating the crisis by mismanaging water in the basin for decades.

“What we’re seeing with climate change increasingly — year after year after year — is that there is not enough water to go around. This crisis should not come as a surprise to anyone,” he said. “We have over-drafted our account, essentially, and now we have to deal with the consequences.”

The situation in the Klamath Basin was set in motion more than a century ago, when the U.S. government began drawing water from a network of shallow lakes and marshlands and funneling it into the dry desert uplands. Homesteads were offered by lottery to World War II veterans who grew hay, grain and potatoes and pastured cattle.

The project turned the region into an agricultural powerhouse — some of its potato farmers supply In ‘N Out burger — but permanently altered an intricate water system that spans hundreds of miles from southern Oregon to Northern California.

In 1988, two species of sucker fish were listed as endangered under federal law, and less than a decade later, coho salmon that spawn downstream from the reclamation project, in the lower Klamath River, were listed as threatened.

The water necessary to sustain the coho salmon downstream comes from Upper Klamath Lake — the main holding tank for the farmers’ irrigation system. At the same time, the sucker fish in the same lake need at least 1 to 2 feet (30 to 60 centimetres) of water covering the gravel beds that they use as spawning grounds.

In a year of extreme drought, there is not enough water to go around. This year, those on all sides of the issue predict a summer as bad — or worse — than 2001 as climate change takes hold.

Beyond the farmers' concerns, the Klamath Tribes sued the Bureau of Reclamation on Tuesday to ensure minimum water levels in Upper Klamath Lake for the sucker fish and asked for a temporary restraining order from the court. That order, if granted, would mean less water flowing down the Klamath River for the coho salmon that are critical to the Yurok Tribe. The tribe is already documenting a proliferation of worms that carry a bacteria fatal to salmon in the lower river because of historically low water levels.

The Klamath Tribes said in a statement after filing their lawsuit that it was “beyond repugnant” that the mismanagement of the ecosystem in the basin forced them to court, potentially jeopardizing a fish key to another tribe's heritage.

“Our hearts break that we have been forced into this position,” Klamath Tribes council member Clay Dumont said. “We know how important the salmon are to our tribal brothers and sisters."

____

Follow Gillian Flaccus on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/gfl

GREEN CAPITALI$M
Climate scientists swap fieldwork for finance

By Iain Withers, Carolyn Cohn and Simon Jessop

4/14/2021

© Reuters/LAURA GARCIA VELEZ A handout image shows Laura Garcia Velez photographed in the Tigray region of Ethiopia in 2017

LONDON (Reuters) - Environmental scientist Laura Garcia Velez cut her teeth on projects to help Ethiopian farmers insure crops for drought and connect remote Colombian communities to the electricity grid before working for conservation campaigners WWF.

Now she's an analyst for Lombard Odier, charged with improving the $350 billion Swiss bank's green credentials.

"It's really important that finance recruits from science," said Velez, one of a growing number of campaigners and scientists who have switched to banking, which she hopes can play a role in "greening the polluting industries".

Activism and finance may seem an unlikely pairing of two implacable foes.

Yet banks, asset managers and private equity firms, faced with tough regulations to decarbonise portfolios and loan books, are competing to grab the people with the right green expertise, according to jobs data and Reuters interviews with finance firms, recruiters and universities.

"Working in sustainability, it used to feel like you were trying to knock down walls," said NatWest's head of climate change James Close, a former director of climate change at the World Bank.

"Now they are pulling us in from the streets through the front door."

Many environmentalists, for their part, say the only way to save the planet is to force big businesses to radically reduce their carbon emissions, and they see the finance world that funds them as one of the best levers.

Some charities and campaigners argue, though, that "greenwashing" is rife in the finance industry. Many new recruits, they say, are used as a marketing tool and often lack the power to drive real change.

DOUBLING PAY PACKETS

Nonetheless, the green rush is on.

The number of job ads for "sustainability" roles nearly doubled to more than 1,000 during the year to February, versus the previous 12 months, according to global finance recruitment specialist eFinancialCareers. Positions range from junior-level analysts to new director-level roles such as head of sustainability or climate change. 

GRAPHIC:  https://tmsnrt.rs/2PAFaLH

Green recruitment specialist Acre said its hires in finance had increased by more than a quarter year-on-year every year since 2017. The most senior posts now offer pay packages of well over 750,000 pounds ($1 million), up around three-fold over the period.

LinkedIn data shared with Reuters shows a steady increase in the number of finance jobs listed as requiring at least one "green skill", such as pollution prevention or ecosystem management, particularly in the United States. 

GRAPHIC: https://tmsnrt.rs/2OtubTF

"There is a race for talent right now, there's no doubt about it," said Elree Winnett Seelig, Citi's global head of ESG for markets, adding that demand was particularly strong in fixed income.

Indeed banks, asset managers and private equity firms have been ramping up their climate teams in the past year, pushing salaries up by 30-50%, said Jon Williams, partner in sustainability and climate change at PwC UK.

One of his team recently doubled their salary by jumping ship to an asset management firm, he added.

Environmental advocacy group workers who move to a bank are typically able to at least double their pay packets once bonuses are factored in, recruiters say. (Graphic: Finance firms ramp up search for green hires, 

https://graphics.reuters.com/CLIMATE-CHANGE/azgvoxwarpd/chart.png

'A DIFFERENT BREED'

Leading universities with specialist centres that combine climate science and finance say they have seen companies beat a path to their door to recruit graduates.

Charles Donovan, executive director of Imperial College London's Centre for Climate Finance and Investment, which is jointly run by climate science hub the Grantham Institute, said there had been an "unbelievable" rise in interest in its students from finance sector employers in the past 18 months.

Banks such as HSBC and Standard Chartered are seeking prospective hires through climate-research partnerships, while some firms are offering scholarships, he added.

While the London financial district may be pulling some talent away from government and advocacy roles, Donovan was unconcerned, saying many who targeted the financial sector were "a different breed of students" who recognised the value of expertise in areas like climate change to differentiate themselves from other graduates looking for jobs in finance. 

Graphic: 'Green' skills growing across most industries

 https://graphics.reuters.com/CLIMATE-CHANGE/FINANCE-TALENT/rlgpdzmkxpo/chart.png

CHASING HURRICANES

Some of the more established environmental experts who have moved across to finance say the rewards are not just financial.

Rob Bailey, director of climate resilience at consulting firm Marsh & McLennan's research unit, previously worked for Oxfam and international affairs think-tank Chatham House.

"I can deploy the knowledge in a different way and working with different stakeholders is quite invigorating," he said.

Some specialists are also drawn by the challenging and often highly technical nature of the work.

For example quantitative analyst Velez, who moved to Lombard Odier last year, is building a tool that links assets to near real-time environmental and geospatial data tracking hurricane risk and pollution.

Swiss bank UBS, meanwhile, has recruited people for its Evidence Lab analyst team with experience across a range of disciplines including geomodelling and hydromodelling in recent years.

"We had to adopt new recruitment strategies and methods to find people with these skills who weren't looking for a job in financial services," said Barry Hurewitz, global head of UBS Evidence Lab Innovations.

Finance firms across the board told Reuters they were expanding scientific and sustainability teams.

Asset manager Schroders said it has more than 10 staff with scientific backgrounds in its insurance-linked securities team, including people with PhDs in climatology. Its sustainable investing team has grown by four people to 22 in the last year and is planning further expansion.

Britain's biggest domestic bank Lloyds has more than doubled the number of staff with core sustainability roles in a year, to over 40, while Zurich Insurance said it had expanded its team researching the modelling of wind, flood, cyber and climate risks, to seven from one in five years.

'PART OF THE MACHINE'

The demand for green expertise is partly being driven by tightening climate regulation on financial services firms in Britain, Europe and beyond.

Euro zone banks will be expected to take climate change into account when making loans or investing, for instance. Funds in the EU will have to disclose how sustainable their products are, while UK lenders could face tougher capital requirements for polluting assets held on their books.

Yet while companies say they are making progress, some charities say they are still playing catch-up.

"In my experience finance firms don't have a great depth of knowledge across the piste. Their skill sets are massively tilted towards the past," said Charlie Kronick, senior climate adviser at Greenpeace UK.

Better hiring must be matched by strategy changes at the top, according to the charities. While many large financial services firms have pledged to decarbonise their lending and portfolios in the coming years, most remain exposed to fossil fuels in some way, they say.

"If you just have a bunch of sustainability officers who are kind of shoved off to the side and are effectively there to help with greenwashing, that's not going to really change the results very much," said Ben Cushing, campaign manager for financial advocacy at U.S.-based environmental group Sierra Club.

And not everyone with an environmental background finds high finance fulfilling.

Ian Povey-Hall, a director at green recruiter Acre, said that while most had no regrets, some had become disillusioned.

"ESG becoming more of a commercial focus has changed things for some people who say their work has become productised as it's become more part of the machine," he said.

Lombard Odier's Velez says she's happy with her decision and satisfied she's not part of a greenwashing problem.

"We are working a lot on how companies will decrease their emissions," she adds. "Of course I want these changes to happen faster - I am a bit more realistic than optimistic."

($1 = 0.7279 pounds)

(Reporting by Iain Withers, Carolyn Cohn and Simon Jessop; Editing by Rachel Armstrong and Pravin Char)

UNDERGROUND ECONOMY

Alberta carpenters' union says construction industry costing province billions by avoiding taxes

Lauren Boothby 

© Provided by Edmonton Journal The Alberta Regional Council of Carpenters and Allied Workers launched its second annual Tax Fraud Days of Action awareness campaign on Wednesday, April 14, 2021, saying the underground cash-based economy has been growing in the province in recent years.

Construction companies are robbing the province of billions of dollars in revenue by shifting the tax burden to unsuspecting workers, says an Alberta carpenters’ union.

The Alberta Regional Council of Carpenters and Allied Workers launched its second annual Tax Fraud Days of Action awareness campaign Wednesday, saying the underground cash-based economy has been growing in the province in recent years.

Executive secretary Derrick Schulte said the industry is hiring more and more workers as subcontractors rather than employees in order to drive costs down and outbid competitors on big projects, including for repair work on some bridges and roads in Edmonton like Anthony Henday Drive.

“There’s a number of contractors doing repair work on the bridges, and they are using similar formulas … to hire people who are listed as subcontractors rather than employees,” Schulte said.

This designation shifts responsibility for paying taxes, Canada Pension Plan contributions, and workers’ compensation on to individuals who don’t understand their rights and legal obligations, leading to legal trouble for these unprotected workers down the road, he said.

“Some of these folks are not construction business people, they’re tradespeople, and they do not understand that,” he said.

Director of organizing Paul Zarbatany says legitimate contractors are being undercut by companies who are cheating the system.

“It’s a system of a (race) to the bottom. It seems the majority of employers and contractors are involved in this. It’s some kind of modern type of serfdom, like in the Middle Ages.”

The union wants the provincial government to take a closer look at the industry, protect workers in these scenarios, and ensure companies pay their taxes to fund needed programs and services in local communities.

Alberta’s finance department declined an interview request and said all questions must be directed to the Canada Revenue Agency.

A Statistics Canada report released last October showed 1.8 per cent of Alberta’s GDP in 2018 was connected to the underground economy.

The same study found residential construction was responsible for 26 per cent of the underground economy across the country. Residential construction has been one of the largest industries involved since the study began in 1992.

 

Record numbers of migrants attempt to enter U.S. amid worsening economic conditions at home

Duration: 02:36 

The Southern border continues to see an overflow of migrants. Manuel Bojorquez reports from Guatemala to provide an inside look at the conditions fueling the migration.

Fed leaders agree: Economics has a racial-disparity problem



WASHINGTON — Top Federal Reserve policymakers on Tuesday underscored their concern that Black and Hispanic people are sharply underrepresented in the economics field, which lessens the perspectives that economists can bring to key policy issues.

“If we don’t have a diverse group of people in the field, we won’t have the right topics to focus on,” said Eric Rosengren, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

At a webinar sponsored by the 12 regional Fed banks, the officials and many outside economists addressed the problem on the same day that a study from the Brookings Institution reported that the top ranks of the Federal Reserve system remain disproportionately white, particularly on the boards of the regional banks.

The viral pandemic and last summer's racial justice protests have thrown a national spotlight on longstanding racial and gender disparities within the U.S. economy, with unemployment rates chronically higher for African Americans and Hispanics and levels of wealth, income and homeownership sharply lower. Yet even in that context, economics trails other fields in measures of diversity, the officials said, and the profession has been slow to address racism as a source of economic inequality.

President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta Raphael W. Bostic speaks at a European Financial Forum event in Dublin, Ireland February 13, 2019.

“Race is a variable that economists are lazy about,” said Raphael Bostic, the president of the Atlanta Fed and the first Black president of a regional Fed bank in the system's 108-year history. "That means we’re drawing conclusions that are often not reflective of reality.”

In an interview, Bostic noted the Fed's adoption last summer of a new policy framework that calls for the central bank to wait for actual increases in inflation before potentially raising its benchmark interest rate. Previously, the Fed would raise rates on the expectation that inflation was poised to accelerate, even though those forecasts didn't always prove accurate.

This new framework, Bostic suggested, reflects the Fed's broadening recognition of the consequences of its policymaking.

“If you cut off the recovery because of fears of inflation, even when you haven’t seen it, you’re preventing groups of people from really fully participating in the economy,” Bostic said. “And when you look at those groups, they tend to be lower-income people, and they tend to be minorities that are the last ones to benefit.”

Ebonya Washington, an economist at Yale University, said during the webinar that just 2.8% of economics Ph.D.'s in 2019 were granted to Black students and 5.8% to Latinos. African-Americans earned more Ph.D.’s in mathematics and other scientific fields, she said.

That suggests, she said, that the problem isn't just a question of building a bigger “pipeline” of young students but of making economics more welcoming to African Americans.

“It’s not about solely changing the student to fit into the flawed profession, but let’s change the flawed profession," Washington said.

The lack of diversity results in a narrower range of research. Dania Francis, an economist at the University of Massachusetts, and Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, co-founder of the Sadie Collective, a non-profit that supports Black women in economics, calculate that from 1990 through 2018 the top five economics journals published only 29 papers that explicitly addressed race and ethnicity. That was fewer than 0.5% of all papers published during that time.

Lisa Cook, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, suggested that the lack of representation is difficult to overcome without more role models in the profession. She praised a summer program run by the American Economics Association for helping address that obstacle.

Young students who participate in the program often say, “This is the first time I've ever had ... a black woman as a professor in an economics class,” Cook said. “We’re not developing, promoting, or tenuring black women ... and that’s true for underrepresented minorities more generally.”

Participants in the webinar noted that academic economists have often been dismissive of racism as a factor in incomes, employment and other economic barometers. A result is that young minority students who are seeking solutions to racial inequalities might be discouraged from pursuing a career in economics.

“There appears to be no evidence that will get economists to admit, yes, there is discrimination, and yes it matters," said William Spriggs, chief economist at the AFL-CIO.

Spriggs and Cook have been mentioned as potential Biden administration choices for the Fed’s Board of Governors, which has one vacancy. If either were nominated and confirmed by the Senate, he or she would become just the fourth Black person to serve as a Fed governor.

The report Tuesday from the Brookings Institution pointed out that the directors of the 12 regional Federal Reserve banks, who select the banks' presidents, are mostly white men with business backgrounds.

The bank directors “are overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly drawn from the business communities within their districts, with little participation from minorities, women, or from areas of the economy — labour, nonprofits, the academy — with important contributions to make to Fed governance,” the report's authors, led by Peter Conti-Brown, a financial historian at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, wrote.

Bostic suggested, though, that the Fed has made progress in the past two decades on board representation.

“We do a lot of analytics to make sure we understand what the nature of the diversity of our boards are,” he said. “That is something that we really give a lot of attention to.”

Christopher Rugaber, The Associated Press

Raphael Bostic, the Fed's first Black branch president, says racism has economic impacts (cnbc.com) JULY 2020

'Dumbest bet you could make:' NCAA under fire again for women's sports inequities

CBC/Radio-Canada  4/14/2021

© Chris Machian/Omaha World-Herald via AP The Central Florida women's volleyball team practices before the NCAA volleyball tournament on Tuesday. The NCAA is being criticized for subpar conditions at the Omaha, Neb., bubble.

Just one month after coming under fire for its mistreatment of women, the NCAA is once again taking heat for the same issue.

With the national women's volleyball championship tournament set to be begin Wednesday, players and coaches are speaking out about subpar conditions in the Omaha, Neb., bubble.

Among their issues are locker rooms that look more like tents, potentially dangerous flooring and a lack of broadcast coverage.


In March, NCAA women's basketball players revealed similar inequities compared to the men's tournament, most notably an underwhelming weight room.

"Anybody who put money on the NCAA changing in a week lost a lot of money and it was the dumbest bet you could ever make," CBC Sports contributor Meghan McPeak said on the latest episode of Bring It In.

"I was not shocked at the NCAA women's tournament and what they had. That's just the NCAA doing what they do best: not caring about anything but the men's side of sports. Not caring about their athletes, period."

Bring It In, CBC Sports' video podcast series, returned Tuesday with its first episode of Season 2, in which host Morgan Campbell discussed with McPeak and fellow contributor Dave Zirin the NCAA double-standards, the potential CFL-XFL partnership and more.

Upon arrival in Omaha, multiple coaches pointed out that the practice courts at the convention centre where the tournament will take place were just "sport court layered over cement flooring," according to Big Ten Network reporter Emily Ehman.

Those conditions increase injury probability — especially for a sport that requires so much jumping.

The locker-room tents and lack of commentary on broadcast streams, originally for the first two rounds of the tournament, also provided cause for concern.

The NCAA responded by saying it inserted felt between the cement and sport courts to ease impact, while adding ESPN commentary for all rounds — though not before claiming it had "no requirement" to include such.

"They didn't apologize because they felt bad, they didn't apologize because they were wrong, they didn't apologize because they had a misstep. They apologized because they got caught — publicly," McPeak said.

Campbell pointed out that the NCAA says it can't pay high-revenue sport athletes such as men's basketball and football players because those funds must be distributed to non-profitable sports.

The lack of investment in women's volleyball, then, is curious.

"Volleyball is a big business in [the U.S.]. Volleyball is huge. Volleyball is the second most popular sport in Brazil, which is only one of the biggest countries on earth. There is money to be made from women's volleyball, but they can't see it for the very reason they can't see that the weight room is absolutely disgusting and insulting compared to the men's," Zirin said.

Commissioner Mark Emmert should be held accountable for the NCAA's continued ignorance of women's sports, the panel agreed.

"He is hurting the NCAA's ability to make money, because women's basketball is on the precipice of being big business, but it can't be big business if its wings are clipped, and that's exactly what Mark Emmert is doing," Zirin said.

US women soccer players appeal decision against equal pay

SAN FRANCISCO — Players on the women’s national soccer team have asked a federal appeals court to overturn a lower court decision throwing out their lawsuit seeking equal pay to the men's team.

THEY SHOULD BE PAID MORE THEY WIN MORE

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Players led by Alex Morgan asked the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday to reinstate the part of their suit that U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner threw out last May when he granted a partial summary judgment to the U.S. Soccer Federation.

“For each win, loss and tie that women players secure, they are paid less than men who play the same sport and who do the same work; that is gender discrimination,” players' spokeswoman Molly Levinson said in a statement. “A pervasive atmosphere of sexism drove this pay discrimination.”

Appeals are assigned to three-judge panels. The 9th Circuit estimates that oral arguments in civil appeals will be scheduled 12-20 months from the notice of appeal and 9-12 months after written briefs have been completed.

The U.S. has won the last two Women's World Cups and is the favourite in this summer's Olympic women's soccer tournament.

Players sued the USSF in March 2019, contending they have not been paid equitably under their collective bargaining agreement that runs through December 2021, compared to what the men’s team receives under its agreement that expired in December 2018. The women asked for more than $66 million in damages under the Equal Pay Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Klausner threw out the pay claim last May, ruling the women rejected a pay-to-play structure similar to the one in the men’s agreement and accepted greater base salaries and benefits than the men, who failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup.

The sides reached a settlement Dec. 1 on working condition claims that Klausner approved Monday. The deal calls for charter flights, hotel accommodations, venue selection and professional staff support equitable to that of the men’s national team.

The USSF says it pays equally for matches it controls but not for tournaments organized by soccer's world governing body.

FIFA awarded $400 million in prize money for the 32 teams at the 2018 men’s World Cup, including $38 million to champion France. It awarded $30 million for the 24 teams at the 2019 Women’s World Cup, including $4 million to the U.S. after the Americans won their second straight title.

FIFA has increased the total to $440 million for the 2022 men’s World Cup, and its president, Gianni Infantino, has proposed FIFA double the women’s prize money to $60 million for the 2023 Women’s World Cup, where FIFA has increased the teams to 32.

___

More AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports

The Associated Press