To listen to the full panel with Louis Audet (board member of IGOPP), about the most recent report of IGOPP on family businesses, please click here or on the image below (the panel’s duration is 43 minutes):

The 2022 Shopify AGM put the spotlight on two controversial theories for driving corporate success: the founder-CEO and multi-class share structures. When it went public in 2015, Shopify’s multi-class structure was fairly standard for an aspirational tech unicorn, if still unusual relative to capital markets as a whole. In recent years an increasing proportion of […]

In a surprising move, Rogers and Altice USA made an offer to buy Cogeco and Cogeco Communications and split their assets between them. If Cogeco were a typical Canadian corporation with a one-share, one-vote capital structure, the would-be buyers could disregard any reticence or opposition by the board of directors and transmit their offer directly […]

1. ISS is finally leashed: SEC Amends Rules for Proxy Advisors On July 22, 2020, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) adopted amendments to better regulate the activities of proxy advisors, such as ISS and Glass Lewis, and to ensure that clients of proxy voting advice businesses have reasonable and timely access to more transparent, […]

Dual-class shares have become one of the most controversial issues in today´s capital markets and corporate governance debates around the world. Namely, it is not clear whether companies should be allowed to go public with dual-class shares and, if so, which restrictions (if any) should be imposed. Three primary regulatory models have been adopted to […]

[ … ] The Quebec government has set aside $1-billion to encourage strategically important businesses to keep their head offices in the province, a measure Finance Minister Eric Girard says he could use to protect the Montreal executive suites of SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. Mr. Girard announced the measure Thursday in his Coalition Avenir Québec government’s […]

With the Bombardier saga and the Couche-Tard warning bell, the usual litany of arguments against dual class of shares was again dusted off. Commentators opposed to this capital structure seem to forget or overlook the inconvenient truth that many of Canada’s industrial champions are controlled corporations often through a dual class of shares. That is […]

Did the quest, one might dare say the obsession, with implementing “good” governance in public corporations result in better stock market performances for those companies that have adopted the best governance practices? Numerous studies, mostly American, have tried to show a convincing relationship between governance and performance, usually with disappointing results. Indeed, it is not […]

In the on-going quest for innovative capital structures, Toyota has recently provided an interesting twist and tied in knots a number of institutional investors. Toyota believes that developing the next generation technologies will require massive investments over many years. It also believes that the current state of investment practices, the prevalence of roaming funds and […]