By James Langton
(May 4 – 17:30 ET) – The citizens advocacy group, Democracy Watch, has taken its campaign for grass-roots shareholder organizations to the Senate Banking Committee.
The group’s spokesman, Duff Conacher, appeared at the committee’s latest hearings working at revising the Canada Business Corporations Act, pushing for a host of measures to help citizens against corporations. Conacher renewed his group’s call for an amendment requiring corporations to mail solicitations to join a national association for individual shareholders with their annual reports.
The association would be formed to help individual shareholders complain about corporations, to help prepare shareholder proposals, to lobby government on behalf of shareholders and educate shareholders about financial planning. “I hope it is obvious to everyone that Canadians desperately need that kind of advice, given what is going on in the markets and given the level of investment activity by individual Canadians,” said Conacher.
Democracy Watch would want mutual fund unitholders, in particular, to be involved in such an association. It asked the senate committee to force public companies to include these solicitations, and says it will be pursuing the Ontario Securities Commission to get them included with fund unitholder communications.
“The Canadian Bankers Association did a very extensive survey a few years ago. The majority of Canadians said that they wanted independent information. They did not want information from the sellers because they recognize that the sellers of financial services have an interest in consumers buying their products over that of their competitors,” says Conacher.