Exclusive polling commissioned by True North reveals that a a majority of Canadians support defunding the CBC. Furthermore, the polling found that a majority of Canadians believe that media subsidies impact impartiality in the press however Canadians still support media subsidies broadly.
Joining Harrison Faulkner on the The Faulkner Show to break down the political ramifications of the polling data is Hamish Marshall, partner at One Persuasion and a pollster and political strategist.
Canadians received some slight financial relief over the summer as the country’s annual inflation rate went down to 2.5% last month, down slightly from 2.7% in June.
Inflation has increased at its slowest pace in over three years, noted Statistics Canada in its monthly Consumer Price Index report.
While certain areas saw relief, like the cost of electricity, travel tours, airline tickets, accommodation, and passenger vehicles, gas prices continued to increase in July.
“Year over year, gasoline prices rose at a faster pace in July (+1.9%) compared with June (+0.4%). Prices accelerated the most in the Prairie provinces, partially attributable to reduced supply amid a refinery shutdown in the Midwestern United States,” reads the report.
The cost of groceries also rose by 2.1% last month as well as shelter costs, which increased by 5.7%.
Additionally, rent costs jumped by 8.5% year over year and mortgage interest increased by 21%.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau celebrated the news in a post to X, saying, “We’ve still got a lot more work to do to make sure Canadians feel that relief in their bank accounts. But inflation is cooling, and that’s welcome news.”
However, vice president of communications at the Montreal Economic Institute Renaud Brossard said it’s not the Trudeau government who should be taking credit for the reduction.
Instead, he credits the policies of Canada’s central bank with the positive change in direction.
“As much as the Trudeau government will want to take credit for the recent drop in inflation, it is rather due to the Bank of Canada’s tightening of our monetary policy,” Brossard told True North.
The central bank has been exercising its policy of quantitative tightening for the past several years, only recently cutting its key inflation rate earlier this summer for the first time since 2020.
The Bank of Canada cut the key rate by 0.25% points, reducing it to 4.75% in June before making another cut last month of 0.5%.
Its key interest rate now sits at 4.5% with the central bank slated to announce its next interest rate on Sept. 4 of this year.
Bank of Canada governor Tiff Macklem said the cuts were made possible due to overall inflation beginning to ease in recent months.
However, Brossard said that Canada’s record-high inflation could have been avoided altogether if the Trudeau government had been more fiscally responsible to begin with.
“The federal government could have helped by reducing its spending and bringing the budget back to balance, but instead chose to keep fanning the flames of inflation with yet another large deficit this year,” said Brossard.
“If it wasn’t for such prolonged government overspending, inflation wouldn’t have risen as high, and the interest rates needed to tame it would have been lower.”
Despite Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s appointment of supposedly “independent” senators, Trudeau’s latest appointment has deep ties to the Liberal party.
Trudeau announced that alongside Charles Adler, he would be appointing Tracy Muggli to the Senate to represent her home province of Saskatchewan. Muggli is a long-time social worker and healthcare professional who is currently the executive director of St Paul’s Hospital Saskatoon.
However, Muggli is also a loyal supporter of the federal Liberal party.
Between 2006 and 2020, Muggli donated to the Liberals 221 times, donating to the party, her local riding association, and Liberal leadership contestants.
Her 221 donations to the Liberals amounted to $18,832.07 in total, with an average donation amount of just over $85. Muggli also gave $915 in non-monetary donations.
Her first few donations were made in July 2006, where she donated $200 to the Liberals and $100 to Liberal leadership candidate and soon-to-be MP Martha Hall.
Muggli frequently supported Hall during her political career, donating $1,856 to help support Hall’s 2007 leadership campaign, to pay Hall’s leadership campaign debt off, and again to support her unsuccessful bid for the Liberal leadership in 2013.
Muggli’s most recent donation to the Liberals was in Sept 2020 when she donated $25 to her local riding association, totalling $225 for that year.
Muggli even ran as a Liberal party candidate in the 2015 and 2019 federal elections in the riding Saskatoon—Grasswood, though she placed a distant third behind the NDP and Conservative candidates in both elections.
In an interview with local media during the 2019 election, Muggli stated that she supported the Liberal government’s firearm ban, the carbon tax, furthering trade ties with China, and implied that Western alienation is a product of misinformation.
The Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointment recommended Muggli’s appointment The body created by Trudeau consists of two members from each province who recommend to the Prime Minister so-called independent and qualified Canadians for the Senate.
The supposedly independent advisory board has a history of being manned by Liberal candidates, donors and recommending other Liberal supporters to the Senate.
In 2021, the Trudeau government appointed Gerald Glavine and Sandra Kelly to the IABSA despite the two having made multiple donations to the Liberal party in the past.
The Trudeau government has also appointed numerous senators who’ve donated to or ran for the Liberals, including Bernadette Clement, Hassan Yussuff, Michèle Audette, Amina Gerba, and Joan Kingston. The Trudeau government even appointed former Liberal MP and cabinet minister Rodger Cuzner to the Red Chamber.
In a comment to True North, a Conservative party spokesperson attacked Trudeau for appointing senators that, despite the independent label, are Liberals in all but name.
“Justin Trudeau lied to Canadians and said he would make the Senate independent and non-partisan but the reality is that nearly every person he has appointed is in fact a Liberal Senator,” said spokesperson Sebastian Skamski.
“The appointment of Charles Adler, one of Justin Trudeau’s biggest cheerleaders and most vicious anti-Conservative attack dogs in the media, and Tracy Muggli, Team Trudeau Liberal candidate and prolific Liberal Party donor, prove that Trudeau is appointing his Liberal friends to defend his disastrous policies.”
Skamski said that under a Conservative government led by Pierre Poilievre, the party would appoint senators that will support priorities such as axing the carbon tax and ending crime.
“When Canadians vote for a common sense Conservative government to axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget, and stop the crime, Pierre Poilievre will appoint Senators who will axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget, and stop the crime.”
True North reached out to the Prime Minister’s office for comment, but no response was given.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has dedicated around-the-clock coverage of US Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ campaign despite being mandated to cover “predominantly and distinctively Canadian” content.
Coverage of the Harris campaign by the CBC has been so extensive it reached a rate of over two stories per day, or 68 stories in the past month.
Based on cbc.ca and Google search results, True North tallied how many stories the taxpayer-funded broadcaster has dedicated to covering the Harris campaign in the past month.
Both video and article content were included in the count. Only stories where Harris’ name appeared in the headline or where the presidential candidate was a main subject of the article or video were counted.
Between July 19 and August 19, the CBC put out 68 pieces of content averaging about 2.2 stories per day on Harris’ campaign over the 31 days.
Coverage included articles and videos with headlines like: “Social media is introducing Kamala Harris to young voters. But will it get her votes?”, “Are Kamala Harris memes of coconut trees and ‘brat summer’ part of her official campaign?”, “Why is everyone going coconuts for Kamala?”, “Harris naming Tim Walz her VP pick is a ‘brilliant decision,’ says Democratic strategist.”
A True North count based on the same criteria found that the CBC only covered Prime Minister Justin Trudeau 18 times. For a few weeks during this period, the prime minister was vacationing with his family in British Columbia.
When comparing coverage, the broadcaster published nearly four times the amount of content on the Harris campaign than they did on the Canadian prime minister.
The CBC’s mandate as outlined by the Broadcasting Act requires that CBC’s content is “predominantly and distinctively Canadian and that it reflects Canada and its regions.” True North reached out to the CBC to ask whether the extensive coverage of a foreign election violated its mandate.
A CBC spokesperson pointed to a blog post published a few hours after True North’s request by CBC News editor-in-chief Brodie Fenlon justifying the Canadian broadcaster’s US election coverage.
In his post, Fenlon acknowledged that “CBC News will get complaints from members of our audience who question why we give a U.S. election so much time and focus.”
“Within our coverage of the world, the United States occupies a special place for some obvious reasons,” wrote Fenlon.
“Simply put, the United States and the policies of its government have a direct and daily impact on the lives of most Canadians. It can easily be argued that the U.S. presidential election matters more to Canadians than any other election beyond our own.”
Fenlon went on to argue that the CBC’s coverage of the US election is through a “Canadian lens” and focuses on what matters to Canada.
CBC did not answer any of True North’s questions about why its coverage was so heavily skewed towards the Harris campaign.
In a comment given to True North, Conservative Deputy Leader Melissa Lantsman blasted the CBC for “growing irrelevancy to Canadian audiences.”
“The CBC receives more than $1.4 billion a year to be the mouthpiece for the Liberal party instead of filling its mandate to Canadians. Despite plummeting viewership and growing irrelevancy to Canadian audiences, Justin Trudeau rewards his handpicked head of the CBC and her executives with fat bonuses for faithfully acting as the Liberal propaganda machine and hiding his many failures,” said Lantsman.
“Common sense Conservatives will defund the CBC so taxpayers no longer pay for the luxurious lifestyles of Trudeau’s propaganda machine and will turn the CBC headquarters into beautiful homes for Canadian families.”
In the latest budget, the Liberals allocated another $42 million in additional funding on top of their $1.4 billion taxpayer subsidies.
An euthanasia advocacy group and two individuals have launched a Charter challenge against the federal government over its exclusion of those suffering solely from mental illness for its medical assistance in dying program.
A statement of claim was issued at the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on Monday by Dying with Dignity Canada and two others who are seeking exemptions to the current regulations.
One individual is 47-year-old Claire Elyse Brosseau, who struggles with bipolar disorder among other issues. The other is 83-year old John Scully, a former journalist and war correspondent, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression.
The challenge was launched in response to the Trudeau government’s decision to delay further expanding its assisted suicide program to include those whose only reason for wanting medically assisted death is for reprieve from struggles with mental illness.
The government pushed the issue of MAiD expansion until 2027 in March, making it an issue that won’t be dealt with until after the next federal election, slated for next October.
“They think it’s begging for death, which it is, but it’s begging for my life, to please, please, please, just let me be free and take it away. Make it stop,” Brosseau told the National Post.
According to the challenge, the exclusion infringes on sections 7 and 15 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which says every person is guaranteed “the right to life, liberty and security.”
The federal government “admits that mental illness can cause enduring and intolerable suffering,” reads the document, which argues that the “blanket exclusion” for those suffering from mental illness has only increased the stigma against them.
“There is no constitutional justification for the prolongation of the enduring and intolerable suffering of those Canadians who are eligible for MAiD but for the mental illness exclusion,” it reads.
While medical assistance in death was first legalized in 2016, only adults with incurable physical illnesses were included under the program’s requirements until March 2021.
The change occurred when the Parliament passed an updated version of the law in the wake of a Superior Court of Quebec decision which ruled that the mental illness provision to be unconstitutional.
The amendment was initially scheduled to take effect in March of last year, however, ministers at the time sought an additional one-year delay as concerns began to grow about the need for more safeguards to protect those already in a very vulnerable state.
Additionally, provinces and territories voiced their concerns about not having enough trained professionals to deal with the expansion through a joint committee in February, leading to the added delay of three years.
Psychiatrists spoke before a group of senators and members of Parliament regarding concerns about how those treating patients with mental illness would face difficulty determining whether the person’s mental illness could be improved or not.
Critics of assisted suicide also questioned how external factors like poverty and poor access to medical care would play a role in someone’s decision to seek euthanasia.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre pledged to scrap expanded eligibility to those with mental illness, should his party win the next election.
Brosseau and Scully say they are seeking a death that is alternative to suicide, which they argue would not only prevent themselves from a violent death but would also protect their loved ones from trauma.
The challenge requests that the court remove the mental illness exclusion and to provide access to Brosseau and Scully by way of an exemption, paving the way for others to apply for exemptions under similar criteria.
According to court documents, assessors have already deemed both Brosseau and Scully eligible under the existing requirements.
The Toronto Police Association are demanding answers from all levels of government after a repeat violent offender with a warrant for his arrest and a deportation order injured three police officers.
According to a news release from the Toronto Police Services, police responded to a call for a break-in in progress around 12 p.m on Friday in the Caledonia Road and Rogers Road area. Three officers sustained minor injuries. The officers are recovering.
Joao Pedro Da Silva Cordeiro, 30, was charged with two counts of assaulting a peace officer, two counts of assaulting a public officer causing bodily harm, two counts of assault with intent to resist arrest and one count of failing to attend court.
Cordeiro attended the Ontario Court of Justice on Saturday.
According to the TPS report, the suspect was wanted on a bench warrant for failing to attend court on previous charges of theft under $5000, assault with intent to resist arrest, assault with a weapon, two counts of assaulting an officer, and two counts of failure to comply with a release order.
In an interview, John Reid, the president of TPA, told True North that Cordeiro came to Canada on a work or study visa and overstayed his allowable time, which resulted in an “open removal” order from the Canadian Border Services Agency.
According to TPA, he faces “at least 17 charges involving two jurisdictions,” while CBSA has ordered his removal from the country.
“On behalf of our members and the public, we are asking all levels of government to stop pointing fingers and explain why this man was still in Canada and why he was not in custody,” the TPA call to action said.
“These rather mundane situations can turn into very violent situations,” Reid told True North in an interview. “These are the jobs which the men and women do every day. But in this particular instance, I would argue that officers didn’t need to ever be hurt here. This individual should have been held in custody, as he’s not even supposed to be here in Canada.”
Reid said it happens all too often that violent offenders are out on bail and put the public and police officers at risk.
“We have people charged with violent criminal offences, and then they released back into the community on bail quite frequently, unfortunately,” he said. “Everyone has the right to bail, but when we have individuals that prove that they have a propensity for violence and a propensity to ignore the orders given by the court, those individuals should not be granted bail.”
If Indigenous lobby groups are good at anything, it’s composing vitriolic resolutions full of Shakespearean “sound and fury signifying nothing.”
A recent example is the emotion-laden resolution passed on June 11 by the Union of BC Indian Chiefs (UBCIC), an Indigenous special-interest organization representing 175 BC Indian Bands with tens of thousands of members, distributed to all BC municipalities on August 12.
The two-month gap between the unanimous passage of the resolution and its public distribution last week suggests this was done as part of a coast-to-coast lobby effort to reverse federal government cuts to the Residential Schools Missing Children Community Support Fund established to help Indigenous communities search for children they allege never returned home from their Indian Residential Schools. (As insignificant as the resolution’s role may have been in this effort, the overall national effort to shame the federal government into rescinding the cut was a huge success.)
The contents of the UBCIC’s Rejection of Residential School Denialism resolution, a chest-pounding and hot air-blowing “sound and fury” document, represent a near total rejection of the well documented purpose, history, operation, and legacy of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools.
Preceded by fourteen inflammatory ‘whereas’ clauses, one of the sub-resolutions says:
THEREFORE BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED the UBCIC Chiefs Council stands with survivors and intergenerational survivors of Residential Schools and their families, as well as the children who never made it home and all those who are harmed by the actions of those involved with the production and distribution of the book Grave Error – How the Media Misled Us and the deeply troubling trend of Residential School racist denialism and any unwillingness to accept historical fact and the work of experts.
The resolution also calls on “all levels of government and the public,” among other things, to “uphold the testimony of those with lived experience who survived and witnessed crimes and human rights violations” at residential schools.
That Grave Error is negatively referenced five times in the declaration speaks volumes to the desire of the UBCIC to defame both its authors and its contents without providing any facts supporting its central claim that “Residential School racist denialism and ardent dissemination of racist disinformation” was “put forward by the authors of Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth about Residential Schools).”
Grave Error, edited by Tom Flanagan and C. P. Champion, and jointly published by True North and the Dorchester Books in December 2023, constitutes a response to the moral panic unleashed in Canada on May 27, 2021, when the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc (legally the Kamloops Indian Band) falsely claimed that it had found “the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.” The same UBCIC poured oil on the flames and further amplified the moral panic on June 30, 2021, when it passed a resolution falsely claiming that a mass grave had been found at Kamloops.
Grave Error sought to correct these false claims.
The task has not been a simple one. Canadian newspaper editors chose the Kamloops announcement as the “news story of the year.” Over the following months, a more comprehensive but equally sinister narrative grew out of the initial Kamloops announcement. Based on similar announcements about other old burial sites, this narrative can be summarized as follows:
The UBCIC resolution accepts all these statements as truthful, adding to them that anyone who disagrees with the genocide charge is a “residential school denialist,” a term it claims is equivalent to Holocaust denial.
“The pain of denialism is deeply offensive and compounds the suffering that generations of survivors have already endured and has no place in public discourse,” it also asserted. This charge implies that Grave Error should be removed from distribution.
No mention is made of the intense pain and suffering the false accusations that thousands of missing children are buried in unmarked graves, many the victims of genocide, have caused.
The UBCIC is no outlier in accepting a narrative that bloomed only after the Kamloops announcement. But regardless of how many times it’s repeated by Indigenous leaders, political activists, academics, and media commentators, it’s either grossly exaggerated or completely false, as shown not only by the contents of Grave Error, a volume none of its critics seem to have read let alone subjected to intense analysis, a book that reports the results of meticulous historical research conducted by dozens of courageous scholars and other objective writers, revealing the Kamloops scandal and others like it as perhaps the largest hoax Canada has ever seen.
This careful research has shown no “missing children” who were “forced to attend” residential schools; instead, their largely voluntary attendance was carefully recorded from registration to completion. The suggestion that missing children were murdered by school personnel after being subjected to physical and sex9ual abuse or even outright torture has also been exposed as an undocumented blood libel. No human remains have been located using ground-penetrating radar at any former Indian Residential School save for persons buried in known but forgotten cemeteries.
As Tom Flanagan has written in summarizing Grave Error’s key findings:
The truth is that there are no “missing children.” The fate of some children may have been forgotten with the passage of generations – forgotten by their own families, that is. But “forgotten” is not the same as “missing.” The myth of missing students arose from a failure of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s researchers to cross-reference the vast number of historical documents about residential schools and the children who attended them. This documentation exists, but the Commissioners did not avail themselves of it.
As the contributor of three chapters to Grave Error, I recommend that municipal leaders pause until they have read Grave Error and made up their own minds.
Grave Error has over 800 reviews on the Amazon Books website, averaging 4.6 stars out of 5. The collection is ranked first on three Amazon lists and has been a best-seller since it was published last January.
One of the top Amazon reviews begins, “A well-researched, non-partisan and balanced approach to the hysterical outpourings of recent years.” Another review says, “There is not one whiff of racism or hatred in this book.”
To once more quote Flanagan:
Grave Error is a collection of some of the best pushback essays published by these brave researchers in response to the Kamloops mythology. They analyze and critique the false narrative of unmarked graves, missing children, forced attendance and genocidal conditions at Indian Residential Schools. The book’s title summarizes the authors’ view of the Kamloops narrative. It is wrong. And not just wrong, but egregiously wrong. Because of this, it fully deserves our sardonic title, which normally might have more in common with a tabloid newspaper headline. Our book shows in detail just why and where the narrative is wrong.
“A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” my sardonic take on the UBCIC resolution, is just as deserving.
As for True North and Dorchester Books, kudos to their proprietors for the courage and honesty to publish this groundbreaking collection of articles.
Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
For additional sources critical of the unmarked graves claim, check out:
From Truth Comes Reconciliation: Assessing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report by Rodney Clifton
Indian Residential School Records
Indian Residential Schools Research Group
Long-time political commentator Charles Adler’s appointment to the Senate has been met with much criticism and questions concerning the Upper Chamber’s so-called independence.
Plus, despite median household incomes rising slightly in 2022, new data shows Canadians got significantly poorer when accounting for inflation.
And a new study reveals Canada’s debt is “much worse” than the government lets on.
Tune into The Daily Brief with Cosmin Dzsurdzsa and Noah Jarvis!
The Liberal Party of Canada joined the movement of major institutions cutting ties with Ottawa’s Pride organization ahead of its annual Pride parade this year after Capital Pride refused to reverse an anti-Israel statement it released early in the month.
The Liberals have decided not to participate in Capital Pride’s annual Pride parade, joining Jewish community groups, the Mayor of Ottawa and several major institutions in withdrawing support for the organization.
The groups criticized Capital Pride for its anti-Israel statement it made on Aug. 6. Capital Pride vowed to join the anti-Israel boycott, divest, and sanctions movement and promised to declare that Israel’s response to Oct. 7 is a genocide at the beginning of each event during the Pride festival.
The group also accused Israel of “pinkwashing” its alleged human rights violations against Palestinians by having human rights for gay people. Israel has had gay rights since 1963, and same-sex activity has been legalized in the Jewish state since 1988.
“In light of recent decisions made by the Capital Pride board, the Liberal Party has decided not to participate in Capital Pride events this year, and instead will host our own event to celebrate Ottawa’s 2SLGBTQI+ communities,” said Liberal Party spokesperson Parker Lund in a statement to the CTV.
Andrew Perez, Principal at Perez Strategies and a Liberal strategist thinks that the federal Liberal Party made the right decision to pull support from Capital Pride amid an exodus of its institutional partners, including the LPC, who have historically participated in the march.
“Capital Pride’s statement does not reflect the positions the Trudeau government has adopted on issues relating to Israel and this conflict: they have not endorsed the BDS movement, nor have they used the term genocide to describe the ongoing Israel-Hamas War,” Perez told True North in an email. “Through their actions, Capital Pride has organized an annual festival that ought to unite people, civil society groups, and major institutions like hospitals and schools, and politicized it over a foreign conflict.”
Jewish community groups were the first to respond to the Pride organization’s anti-Israel stance last week. Six groups, including the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, the Jewish Federation of Ottawa, and Hillel Ottawa, banded together to denounce Capital Pride’s decision.
The groups criticized Capital Pride for failing in its mandate to ensure the inclusion and safety of all the members of the LGBT+ community, claiming that Jewish community members were being ostracized from this year’s event.
Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe vowed not to participate in the Thursday parade. The University of Ottawa has followed suit, saying Capital Pride’s anti-Israel statement doesn’t align with the university’s values.
“The University of Ottawa is committed to fostering a space of respect and inclusion for all. In light of recent statements made by Capital Pride, the University has made the difficult decision to withdraw from the 2024 Capital Pride Parade,” Jesse Robichaud, a spokesperson for the university, told True North. “The statements do not align with the University’s broader mission and values. This decision does not change our enthusiasm and commitment toward celebrating Pride and supporting the LGBTQ2S+ community on our campuses and throughout our region.”
A growing number of major institutions that have withdrawn support from Capital Pride, such as the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, the United States Embassy in Ottawa, and the Public Service Pride Network, who have since joined the Jewish community in boycotting the march.
On Monday, Capital Pride posted an Instagram statement reaffirming its commitment to inclusivity and safety. However, it hasn’t indicated that it would change its public stance on the Israel-Hamas conflict.
“We reiterate that Capital Pride is, and always will be, committed to combating all forms of hate, discrimination and intolerance, including antisemitism and Islamophobia,” the statement said. “Queer and trans people of all religions, including Jewish and Muslim folks, are an integral part of our local community. We reject any attempts to marginalize religious and cultural minority groups from the broader Pride movement.”
Dr. Casey Babb, a Senior Fellow at the Macdonald Laurier Institute, feels that the statements reflect only that Capital Pride has fallen victim to “intentionally engineered antisemitic propaganda.
“Capital Pride – like so many other ‘progressive’ entities have continued to regularly parrot Soviet-style antisemitic messages and rhetoric which unfortunately, but not surprisingly, have become a pillar of the contemporary left,” Babb told True North in an email.
“Before it releases any further statements – Capital Pride might want to take some time to look inward, to reflect, and to understand the root causes and origins of its incredibly disturbing and disgusting stance on Israel – the only country in the entirety of the Middle East where they would be welcomed and embraced.”
The free-market economy relies on a central tenet: It is the job of a corporation to maximize returns to its shareholders. This is the purpose of all corporations, no matter what business they engage in.
This concept, which places the interests of a company’s shareholders – its owners – above all else, is known as “shareholder primacy.” It is so central to good corporate governance that companies and regulators have developed a mechanism, the shareholder proposal, which allows anyone who holds more than minimal stock in a corporation to petition its board of directors to examine an issue with an eye towards improving the company and its value.
But in the 21st century – especially in the last ten years or so – shareholder proposals have been repurposed and weaponized by activist groups to pressure companies to disregard shareholder primacy and to adopt policies informed by ideological concerns instead.
In Canada the main targets of these ideologically driven agendas have been oil and natural gas companies, among the most productive pillars of our national economy, as well as the banks that fund them. Using shareholder proposals, activists have set out to limit and ultimately put an end to Canadian oil and natural gas exploration, production and export.
Activist groups including Investors for Paris Compliance, Stand.earth and Environmental Defence Canada have presented anti-fossil-fuel shareholder proposals to all major Canadian banks and other companies in our natural resource sector. Last year, for example, Stand.earth demanded that the Royal Bank of Canada’s (RBC) board of directors “adopt a policy for a time-bound phase-out of RBC’s lending and underwriting to projects and companies engaging in new fossil fuel exploration, development and transportation.” In other words, they were asking Canada’s biggest bank to stop supporting an industry that sustains hundreds of thousands of Canadian jobs, pays tens of billions of dollars in taxes annually, and forms the economic backbone of our country.
Until recently, these stunts were largely pulled without any opposition. But last year InvestNow, the not-for-profit organization I lead, submitted and presented countervailing shareholder proposals to three Canadian banks asking for explicit commitments to continue to invest in and finance Canadian hydrocarbon energy.
We’ve continued that work this year, presenting shareholder proposals at the annual general meetings of all five big chartered banks – BMO, CIBC, Scotiabank, RBC and TD – asking them to commission and issue reports qualifying and quantifying the impacts and costs of their “net zero” commitments.
This year InvestNow also submitted our first shareholder proposal to an energy company. We asked Suncor Energy Inc., one of Canada’s largest oil producers and refiners, to drop its pledge to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and rededicate the company to its core business of producing and refining crude oil. In our view, Suncor should be producing more oil and getting it out to more customers in Canada and around the world – not contributing to its own demise and that of its industry.
As expected, InvestNow’s proposals were opposed by the boards of directors at the banks and at Suncor and ultimately rejected. Even so, our hope is that we planted a seed in the directors’ minds about their duty of care and fiduciary obligations to the company’s shareholders.
This isn’t merely wishful thinking. After all, south of the border we are seeing substantial pushback on this front. New asset management firms like Strive Asset Management have been founded explicitly to “live by a strict commitment to shareholder primacy.”
There are also growing calls for a return to shareholder primacy in the political arena. There is a valid concern that ideologically motivated corporate activities pose a threat both to the financial integrity of public pension funds and a challenge to democratic governance. A number of states have created the non-profit State Financial Officers Foundation whose mission is “to drive fiscally sound public policy, by partnering with key stakeholders, and educating Americans on the role of responsible financial management in a free market economy.” The organization and its members are firm and vocal defenders of shareholder primacy.
Further pushback is coming from some of the recipients of activist shareholder proposals. ExxonMobil is among the leaders here. The company has long been reviled by environmentalists for its insistence on keeping profitability, technical excellence and energy production central to its business.
In January, ExxonMobil filed a lawsuit to block a shareholder resolution put forward by the groups Follow This and Arjuna Capital, whose stated objective was to force the company to commit to precipitous cuts in CO2 emissions, including with respect to the downstream effects from the combustion of its products by customers. Exxon argued that such a resolution would force the company to “change the nature of its ordinary business or to go out of business entirely.” Which is what these “shareholders” intend; Exxon’s lawsuit quotes Arjuna Capital’s contention that “Exxon should shrink” and Follow This’s statement that its goal is “to wind down the company’s business in oil and natural gas.”
By taking a stand, ExxonMobil was bucking the industry trend of attempting to placate activists. Those attempts have been unsuccessful. Meanwhile, ExxonMobil’s bolder, more confrontational tactic led to both activist groups dropping their proposals and promising not to bring forward similar demands in future.
Canadian firms should take note. The more they give in to anti-oil and gas activists, the more they’ll have to deal with them, to the detriment of both their business and our economy. Perhaps that they will soon see the sense in saying “No” to the activists and “Yes” to shareholder proposals like ours.
The future of shareholder primacy is bright. All it will require to triumph is a little courage.
The original, full-length version of this article was recently published by C2C Journal.
Gina Pappano is executive director of InvestNow and was formerly head of market intelligence at the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) and TSX Venture Exchange (TSXV).
