Social Capital Partners appoints slate of new advisors

January 21, 2025| News release

January 21, 2025, Toronto (ON): Social Capital Partners CEO Matthew Mendelsohn today announced the appointment of a new Advisory Board that will support the organization in its next phase of work confronting growing wealth inequality in Canada. The nonprofit’s mission is to create more pathways to wealth and asset ownership for working people.

“The economic assumptions that have informed our understandings of how capitalist, democratic economies work are collapsing in front of our eyes,” says Mendelsohn. “That vacuum needs to be filled with realistic and viable options to make the economy work better for more people.”

The data are clear that working people and young people are facing higher barriers to economic security than in previous decades. Those challenges are creating well-founded anxieties that are causing the destabilization of democratic societies around the world.

“At Social Capital Partners, we are comfortable trying new things, even when we’re unsure of the outcomes,” says Mendelsohn. “We have assembled a creative, intellectually diverse group of brilliant, kind Canadians who all want our economy to work better. They will challenge our assumptions and help us make the right strategic choices about where we put our resources in the coming years.”

Advisory Board members will advise on SCP’s strategy and agenda, drawing on decades of experience across finance, business, government, public policy, communications, civil society and community economic development. They include:

“We have assembled a creative, intellectually diverse group of brilliant, kind Canadians who all want our economy to work better.”

Upkar Arora, CEO of Rally Assets.

Victor Beausoleil, Executive Director of SETSI – The Social Economy Through Social Inclusion.

Vass Bednar, Executive Director of McMaster University’s Master of Public Policy in Digital Society program.

Tiffany Callender, Co-Founder and CEO, Federation of African Canadian Economics (FACE).

Jeff Cyr, Founder & Managing Partner of Raven Indigenous Raven Indigenous Capital Partners.

Brian Dijkema, President, Canada at Cardus.

Tariq Fancy, Founder of The Rumie Initiative.

Rob Germain, CEO at CHEK Media.

Alex Himelfarb, Former Clerk of the Privy Council.

Charmian Love, Chief International Advocacy Officer at Natura &Co.

Marguerite Mendell, Distinguished Professor Emerita at the School of Community and Public Affairs and Director of the Karl Polyani Institute of Political Economy and Concordia University.

Erin Millar, CEO and Co-founder of Indiegraf.

Jennifer Robson, Associate Professor of Political Management at Carleton University.

Edward Waitzer, past Chair of Stikeman Elliott LLP.

To learn more about the Advisory Board and see complete biographies, please visit www.socialcapitalpartners.ca/our-people/.

About Social Capital Partners

Who owns the economy matters. Social Capital Partners believes working people deserve a fighting chance to build economic security and wealth. A Canadian nonprofit organization founded in 2001, we undertake public policy research, invest in initiatives and advocate for ideas that broaden access to wealth, ownership and opportunity, and that push back against extreme economic inequality. To learn more, please connect with us on LinkedIn or Bluesky or visit socialcapitalpartners.ca.

For more information, or to arrange an interview, please contact:

Katherine Janson
Director of Communications
Social Capital Partners
647-717-8674
katherine@socialcapitalpartners.ca

Changing narratives Economic policy Wealth inequality

Share with a friend

Related reading

BlogIn the mediaThe Ownership Solution
Two women walk in tech office looking at iPad

Why Canada should back employee ownership trusts for the long term | TheFutureEconomy.ca

Established in 2024, Employee Ownership Trusts (EOTs) allow business owners to sell their companies to a trust held on behalf of employees, keeping firms in Canadian hands, building worker wealth and strengthening local communities. Jon Shell makes the case for EOTs in TheFutureEconomy.ca. With a temporary capital gains tax exemption set to expire in 2026, he and other advocates are urging the federal government to make the incentive permanent before momentum stalls.

BlogIn the mediaThe Ownership Solution

How Employee Ownership Trusts keep wealth in Canada | Canadian Business

The coming wave of business successions will shape Canada’s economy for generations. In Canadian Business, Jon Shell explains how employee ownership safeguards economic sovereignty, while boosting growth, productivity and local wealth, giving employees struggling with affordability a new source of income. As entrepreneurs and owners seek alternatives to selling abroad, the employee ownership trust (EOT) provides a practical answer. Instead of letting the EOT tax incentive expire at the end of 2026, now is the time for the government to double down on employee ownership.

BlogExplainer

A housing boom isn’t a win for wealth equality and here’s why

Canada's wealth gap appeared to narrow between 2019 and 2023 and we set out to make sense of this. SCP's Director of Policy Dan Skilleter, the lead author on our 2024 Billionaire Blindspot report, connected with sector colleagues working on wealth concentration and dug into all the best available data. What he found was that the dip was largely a mirage, driven by a pandemic housing boom that temporarily inflated the one asset ordinary Canadians hold: their home. Meanwhile, these soaring prices locked out an entire generation from building wealth altogether.

Skip to content