When shareholders of Canada’s big banks opened their proxy voting forms in early 2008, they found a striking new proposal on the ballot. Submitted by a small ethical mutual fund company, the resolution called on banks to give investors an annual vote on how executive pay was designed. Bank boards initially opposed the motion as […]

Montreal, June 7, 2017 – Today, the Institute for Governance (IGOPP) is publishing a policy paper entitled: From independent to legitimate and credible – The challenge facing boards of directors. Back in 2008, IGOPP had noted that, despite its presumably crucial role and its omnipresence, the concept of «independent» board members lent itself to several […]

In this snapshot review by Willis Towers Watson of U.S. say-on-pay and other compensation-related votes, WTW found that average support for say on pay remained high at 91%.  In addition, where ISS identified “high” levels of concern leading to negative recommendations on say on pay, 84% related to pay-for-performance concerns (compared to 75% in 2017).  WTW analyzed the […]

Introduction The Clarkson Centre for Board Effectiveness (CCBE) at the Rotman School of Management has a mission to study corporate governance and provide practical insights for companies about what good governance means. For more than a decade, we, like many of our peers, embraced the widely-held and publicly-listed model as the paradigm of good governance. […]

The corporate hunting season is officially underway, an annual ritual during which shareholder parties, armed with proxies and other weapons of democratic destruction, set out to bag executives and directors for failing to deliver. The list of potential corporate failings is all encompassing. Anything and everything is a target, from executive compensation to diversity policies […]

As a longtime member of the Association of Correspondents Tracking the War On Corporations, I have embedded with troops of lawyers, activists and corporate officials through the great battles of the last several decades. From the failure to ward off the stakeholder invasion of the 1990s to the great executive retreat at the Battle of […]

If they were to live on the average worker’s pay, Canada’s CEOs could stop working at around 11 a.m. on Jan. 2 and take the rest of the year off. That’s because by 10:57 a.m. on the second day of the year, their earnings will have already hit $49,738, the equivalent of the country’s average […]

Current executive compensation practices are making Canadian CEOs rich, but at the expense of a strong corporate culture and the long-term interests of shareholders, according to a new report from the Institute for Governance of Private and Public Organizations (IGOPP). “Mutual trust, loyalty, the sharing of objectives and pride in the organization, the sense of […]

Today, the Institute for Governance of Private and Public Organisations (IGOPP) released its policy paper entitled Executive Compensation: Cutting the Gordian Knot.  The compensation of CEOs remains a contentious issue and, for the past twenty years, has drawn sharp and unrelenting criticism, much of it justified.  At issue has been the fact that the ratio […]

Companies should give CEOs share units less often and stop paying them with stock options to motivate better long-term performance and minimize the role of luck in compensation payouts, a new report argues. The Quebec-based Institute for Governance of Private and Public Organizations has proposed revamping the model for executive pay in Canada, saying companies […]

The typical Canadian CEO makes $8 million a year, 140 times the average private-sector salary, according to new research by the Montreal-based Institute for Governance of Private and Public Organizations (IGOPP). In the banking sector, that ratio is even higher, with the median CEO compensation at $10.5 million. Things, though, weren’t always so. In 1998, […]

Winston Peters’ swingeing attack on Fonterra boss Theo Spierings’ $8.3 million pay packet could be the first real salvo in his self-advertised campaign to ‘clean up corporate New Zealand’. There was little attention given to Peters’ campaign against alleged business “fat cats” while he was slugging it out on the election trail. But given the […]

Yvan Allaire has a great analysis of Dow Jones’ overreaction to Snapchat’s IPO and the dual class stock phenomenon in general: ”In July 2017, Dow Jones, goaded by the reaction to Snapchat having gone public with a class of shares without voting rights, announced that, after extensive consultation, it had decided to henceforth eliminate companies […]

The United Kingdom is stiffening the rules large companies must follow in an effort to rein in executive pay and bolster the input of ordinary employees in the running of their firms. On Tuesday, the government outlined a series of changes. Large publicly-traded companies will have to report annually the ratio of CEO pay to […]

Corporate America started the year ready to engage with a controversial but business-minded president. This week CEOs have risen in chorus to denounce Trump’s lackluster response to racism. Not since the 1930s, when prominent business heads publicly broke with Franklin Roosevelt, has a US president seen such a revolt by leading business executives. [ … […]

There’s been a substantial turnover of university leaders recently in Quebec, and finding replacements has sometimes proven difficult. No fewer than nine university institutions in Quebec have seen their executive head depart since 2015. Several of the rectors – the term used for university presidents in Quebec – left their posts after a single mandate […]