Business Law Blog

Earlier this month, Tesla Inc.’s shareholders voted in favour of a re-domestication of the company from Delaware to Texas. The company announced that it had moved to Texas on the same day, meaning that is has ceased to be governed by Delaware corporate law and is now governed by Texas corporate law.^[1]

The proposed move was a reaction to the shareholder protections in ...

Federal corporations take notice – the federal government is amending the Canada Business Corporations Act (“CBCA”) in an effort to increase transparency regarding the ownership of Canadian corporations. Bill C-42, An Act to amend the Canada Business Corporations Act, which comes into force on January 22, 2024, will introduce several amendments to the CBCA ...

In a post one year ago aimed at situating the prevailing corporate governance trends for directors of Canadian companies, this blog noted that “there is a torrent of profoundly important issues facing society in our time, many of them amounting to real crises… [A]s pressures mount on corporations to react to external crises, directors of Canadian corporations must ...

Summary of the Article

• The Canadian Securities Administrators (the “CSA”) have published a notice and request for comment on proposed National Instrument 51-107 – Disclosure of Climate-related Matters (the “Proposed Instrument”) and its companion policy, which would establish mandatory climate-related disclosure requirements for reporting issuers in ...

Amendments to National Instrument 31-103 Registration Requirements, Exemptions and Ongoing Registrant Obligations (“NI 31-103”) and the new requirements under Client Focused Reforms (“CFRs”)

The Canadian Securities Administrators (“CSA”) have amended NI 31-103 to introduce new registrant conduct requirements, with the stated objective of better ...

In the fall of 2015, the well-known corporate lawyer Martin Lipton issued a paper entitled Will a New Paradigm for Corporate Governance Bring Peace to the Thirty Years’ War. Focused on what were then widespread concerns about corporate short-termism and, more particularly, the effect of activist hedge funds on long-term corporate value, this article was a prelude to Mr ...

Unprecedented. Have you heard that word a lot in the past 4-5 months? Not surprisingly, the word ‘unprecedented’ is the default word to describe society’s reaction to COVID-19, its effects on our healthcare systems, our behaviours, our compliance (or not) with government directives and guidelines, and the impact to our economy and economic well-being. This is, in ...

Changes to corporate law allowing the creation of a “benefit company”, a form of corporation whose business, in addition to aiming to generate profits, promotes one or more public benefits, will come into force in British Columbia on June 30, 2020. The legislation, discussed in our June 2019 blog post and the first of its kind in Canada, allows new benefit companies to be ...

Since the start of the spread of COVID-19 in Canada, the federal and provincial governments have announced various programs and subsidies to help Canadian businesses survive in light of the challenges posed by necessary social distancing measures, as discussed in our previous blog post here. Despite recent announcements to respond to gaps in government programs for ...

The 50^th Earth Day has passed this year under the shadow of a global pandemic, where the immediacy of human health has eclipsed, for now, the focus on the long-term health of the planet and humanity’s place within it that had begun to preoccupy businesses and investors. From a corporate governance perspective, that is reasonable, as risks to short-term survival take ...