Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec opened an office in India in 2016, betting that the country’s favourable demographics would fuel returns in renewable energy and transportation infrastructure. Now, the Canadian pension giant has become entangled in what U.S. authorities call “an elaborate scheme” to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes in […]

Former Gildan Activewear Inc. chief executive Glenn Chamandy fired back at the company’s latest accusations concerning his leadership, saying the board is seeking to unfairly harm his reputation and cast aspersions on his performance. The company on Tuesday took aim at Mr. Chamandy’s leadership, alleging he had become disengaged from his job, and that he had an […]

[…] Even before this latest scandal, questions were being raised about why a Canadian corporate pillar like the Caisse would jump into the security industry and, later, associate itself with a company like G4S, which has a checkered recent history. Critics say the pension giant, which administers the retirement funds for thousands of public-sector employees, has no business […]

A leading investors’ rights group in Quebec is pressing publicly traded Canadian companies to reveal what languages their board members speak, saying the disclosure is needed to ensure rising expectations for corporate diversity are being met. The call comes from Montreal-based Mouvement d’éducation et de défense des actionnaires, known as Médac. The group says the […]

A thick hide is a necessary qualification for the job of activist short-seller. When Spruce Point Capital Management released a negative report on Canadian Tire Corp. Ltd. in late 2019, it prompted Yvan Allaire, the executive chair of the Institute for Governance of Private and Public Organizations, to fire back in the Financial Post: “What […]

When any individual investor or fund comes to the conclusion after careful analysis that a company is over-valued, it may very well sell short the shares of that company. Fair enough. If the analysis proves right, facts on the ground will confirm it eventually and the stock price will drop. But that’s not the game plan […]

A Quebec judge has ruled that SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. can stand trial on bribery and fraud charges, prolonging the Canadian engineering giant’s legal pain and keeping the case in the public eye in the run-up to this fall’s federal election. Justice Claude Leblond of the Quebec Court ruled Wednesday that there is enough evidence to […]

Excerpted and translated from “Le fiasco SNC-Lavalin: crime, culture, governance?” by Yvan Allaire, executive chairman of the Institute for Governance of Private and Public Organizations, published in Policy Options March 18, 2019.  The tragedy of SNC-Lavalin was in the making between 2000 and 2012. To outside observers, these were years of quiet profitability for the […]

In Ottawa, there appears to be little sympathy these days for SNC-Lavalin, the giant engineering corporation facing prosecution for bribery schemes in Libya. The company was hoping to strike a deal with federal prosecutors in order to avoid a trial. If guilty, it would be cut off from lucrative Canadian government contracts for a decade. […]

The long series of scandals ensnaring SNC-Lavalin Group Inc.  has one former executive of the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec calling for more accountability when it comes to corporate bribes for global contracts. Michel Nadeau, a former deputy chief executive of Caisse – the largest shareholder in SNC – told BNN Bloomberg on […]

Statistics Canada estimates that, in 2017, “4.9 million Canadians aged 15 to 64 spent an estimated $5.7 billion on cannabis for medical (10% of the market) and non-medical (90% of the market) purposes. This was equivalent to around $1,200 per cannabis consumer.” Private companies, several of them listed on the stock exchange and already supplying […]

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 […]

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 is a Chinese proverb that says He who knows he has enough is rich; but the modern Western version of the saying seems to be: One never has enough; I deserve more; or There is always someone who has more. Over the last years, we have built a system of incentives and motives so […]

Pershing Square Capital Management, an activist hedge fund owned and managed by William Ackman, began hostile maneuvers against the board of CP Rail in September 2011 and ended its association with CP in August 2016, having netted a profit of $2.6 billion for his fund. This Canadian saga, in many ways, an archetype of what […]

” U.S. fertilizer producer Mosaic Co boosted its chief executive officer’s pay last year by more than $5 million as a reward for slashing costs and jobs, a regulatory filing shows. Construction of excess potash capacity and fiercer competition have pressured the sector, and leading North American producers Mosaic, Potash Corp of Saskatchewan and Agrium […]